tricityherald.com / Opinions / Columnists

reprint or license Print E-Mail

Friday, Oct. 02, 2009

Exploring sites for Reach center brings opportunity

By Kimberly Camp, Linda Boomer and Ron Lerch, Mid-Columbia Voices

The Richland Public Facilities District has always known that Columbia Point South is a special place. The Native American community has shown us it is more special than we could know.

The city of Richland supported the decision to locate the Hanford Reach Interpretive Center at Columbia Point South as a way to celebrate the location's uniqueness and beauty, preserve it for generations to come and protect it from commercial development, illicit activities and damage from recreational use.

In the past, human activity - from all-terrain vehicles racing to illegal looting - threatened to spoil the natural state of the site.

Reach officials included several mitigation strategies into the center's design, including doubling the setback from the sensitive shorelines and archaeological sites to the placement of 150,000 cubic yards of topsoil on the site to minimize ground-disturbing activity.

The Native American tribes and nations of the Nez Perce, Colville, Umatilla, Yakama and Wanapum Band said this was not enough. After numerous studies, the site was declared eligible for inclusion on the National Registry for Historic Places by the National Park Service.

The next step requires the Richland Public Facilities District to prove there are no reasonable or prudent alternatives to building our facility on the Columbia Point South site. The law also requires that if a viable alternate is available, we must build there.

The Richland PFD formally began the process of considering alternate sites at its Sept. 28 board meeting. During that meeting, we discussed the criteria we should use in looking for a new site, and then directed CEO Kimberly Camp use that criteria to "explore the economic and other aspects of alternate sites that might be available to us."

We all agreed that time is of the essence and a viable alternative needs to be identified as soon as possible.

In anticipation of a vote to authorize the exploration of a new site, our CEO, working with city officials, presented a report on some possible alternate locations, including some that would require the purchase of private land, to start the process.

Not all of the sites on our preliminary list of alternatives are owned by the city of Richland. Through subsequent review, some may prove to be too expensive, some may not work well with our current building design and some may not meet the selection criteria that we adopted.

But exploring new sites is opening up new possibilities to enhance our project and make it even better than it was, and possibly accelerate it.

We are committed to making the Hanford Reach Interpretive Center a success. Its mission and vision will serve as a cultural catalyst for increasing the quality of life for all members of our community, and will serve as an important component of long-term economic growth in the region.

Finding a new site presents us with an opportunity to make the project even more meaningful, which we will do within the parameters of the law. We wouldn't have it any other way.

* Kimberly Camp is CEO of the Hanford Reach Interpretive Center, Linda Boomer, is president of the Richland Public Facilities District Board, and Ron Lerch is chairman of the Hanford Reach Interpretive Center Board.

@Nyx.AuthorDisplayName@ wrote on @Nyx.PostedAtTime@:

@Nyx.CommentBody@

@Nyx.Recommender@ @Nyx.AbuseReporter@