Someone left the cake out in the rain.

Fort Worden’s $2 million glamping project is a soggy mess. I walked the hillside where the glamping project was supposed to have 19 luxury tents completed by June. The clouds were spitting rain and the wind cut like a knife. I counted only 16 sites under construction. Only one luxo-tent is completed. That is the model home for the development, so to speak. The rest are in various states of being somewhat done to just started.

I saw no evidence of the “event center” that was going to anchor the development. From what I can tell from public documents, the fancifully labelled “event center” was to be just a large mess tent.

16 tents for $2 million.

The platforms were sited to utilize extant sewer and water lines from the days when the military housed personnel on this hillside. The lines were fixed and upgraded. Electricity was run to each tent platform The rest is canvas and rope, lumber, plywood, nails, screws and PVC.

Those are indeed luxury tents: $125,000 each. That kind of money could have rehabbed quite a few rooms in Fort Worden’s existing inventory of buildings. It could have bought super-attractive tiny homes from GreenPods on Sims Way that could be rented as cabins year-round. These tents on that blustery, chilly hillside would be unheated and available for rent only during our summer months.

The project is deteriorating without bringing in any income. The tents last only ten years. For those few bundles of canvas that have been spread over frames, they will have one winter less in their life-span before they see their first glamper sipping Chablis and snacking on Brie and crackers.

It is doubtful this project will ever see completion. Acting PDA Manager David Timmons has discovered that $600,000 of the $2 million loaned by Kitsap Bank specifically for the project was diverted to other uses without Board approval.

I wrote that Fort Worden has been hit by the Cherry Street Project Disease. Examine the photos below. Similar causes, I wrote. Similar symptoms, too.

Delayed From the Start

A review of the minutes of the Fort Worden PDA Board of Directors shows that the glamping project fell behind even in the conceptual stage, which began in 2015. Three years later it got a Power Point presentation in February 2018.  It was originally supposed to have a “soft open” in March 2020. That was critical to its financial viability. Then it was to be June, and there was talk of August. Now it’s opening date is no longer even under consideration.

By way of comparison, during the 4-5 years the Fort Worden PDA has been talking about and stumbling forward building some tent platforms, the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe started and finished its multi-story hotel at its Blyn casino.

Governor Inslee’s lock down order stopped construction temporarily in mid-March, although government projects that provided housing were permitted to move forward. The PDA, curiously, did not try to shoehorn its project into this exemption. (A swimming pool in Port Angeles used the fact that it had a room for day care to continue construction as a government housing project.) Then, when a couple months later the Governor allowed construction across the board to resume, the PDA didn’t have the money it had borrowed for the project. In violation of the terms of its bond from Kitsap Bank, the PDA had diverted those funds elsewhere.

So the project sits empty, stalled out in cold, winter rains with water pooling on plywood platforms. It’s sharing that exposed, weathered plywood look with the Cherry Street Project.

The PDA’s loan to Kitsap Bank is due the first quarter of 2021. The PDA doesn’t have the money to pay what it owes. Kitsap Bank reportedly financed the $2 million glamping loan internally, which means our local bank will also a take hit due to the PDA’s malfeasance.  Like a bank that lends to broke nations, there does not seem to be any collateral that can pay off some of the bad debt loss. And its not just that the PDA has fallen short; it violated the terms of its loan by spending the funds on things besides the project for which the loan was extended.

A Pipedream

Why did the PDA ever think that its costly glamping project made financial sense?

In a March interview with The Leader David Robison, PDA’s Executive Director for the past 9 years (but now retiring), said that Fort Worden’s glamping facility would be just like the one where he had stayed in Friday Harbor up in the San Juan Islands. The glamping facility there is the Lakedale Resort at Three Lakes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robison said that the PDA’s glamping tents would be almost exactly the same as these. I was able to peek inside the model tent (The vent was open. I zipped and snapped it shut after my look-see.) The single finished model does appear roughly similar to the Lakedale resort tents, but not as elaborately decorated.

The major difference is the surroundings. The Fort Worden setting is not comparable to Lakedale’s lakeside isolation. The PDA’s glamping sites, for which they had hoped to charge from about $170 to over $220 a night, are squeezed behind old Army buildings along black top roadways.

None of the tents pictured are finished. Their platforms are incomplete. In some, utilities are not connected and all are unfinished inside–just bare plywood for flooring, wires hanging from rafters, etc. (You can see some of this through windows that have been left open. I did not step inside any tents.) You could say that the few with canvas are just hiding all the work that’s been left undone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for the $125,000 luxo-tents in the trees (“incredibly luxurious,” Robison claimed), this is what they look like now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the Guard Shack is done–Or what’s with the Peninsula Daily News?

The Leader ran with a large front-page story about the financial crisis at Fort Worden. The widely read Jefferson County Facebook page, the on-line news outlet of Patrick Sullivan, former Leader editor, and Joe D’Amico of Security Services Northwest, provided expanded coverage on the crisis. The Port Townsend Free Press has run two stories about the impending collapse of the PDA’s house of cards and its years of dodgy finances (here and here). Not a word from the Peninsula Daily News. This is kind of, like, you know, a pretty big deal. The Fort Worden PDA is a pillar of Port Townsend’s creative community, it houses Centrum’s festivals, and it is one of the county’s largest employers with 170 on its payroll.

Two weeks after the alarming news broke, the PDN finally had news on Fort Worden. This was a front-page story!

The old guard shack has been restored.

[It was pointed out to us since publication of this article that the PDN did have a story on the financial malfeasance at Fort Worden. But the information about the improper shifting of funds, credit card abuses and defalcations was buried deep into the article, and it took the PDN a full two weeks to acknowledge the crisis. And, to be clear, the guard house restoration was a project of the Friends of Fort Worden, which has been untainted by the financial scandals of the PDA.]

In closing, for your listening pleasure and reflection, here’s Richard Harris’s iconic ballad about how it feels when reality sets in and can no longer be avoided.