The Multi-Purpose Future

The saving of Lily Point from development has been a big source of good feelings here in Pt. Roberts over the last year. Well, maybe the would-be developers weren’t so happy, but they have plenty of other things to be unhappy about and the idea that their ostensibly developable property is bounded by a park can’t be a bad thing. Well, not exactly a park, more a marine reserve. And therein lies a tale, I’m afraid.

Last week, the P.R. Historical Society announced a meeting to have a discussion between and among various interested parties, including the Historical Society, the Nature Conservancy, the County Parks people, and P.R. residents as to the plan to remove the pilings, metal debris, and other sources of shoreline evidence of the historical APA Cannery from Lily Point. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend, but here's how Meg Olson described some of the commentary from the recent first anniversary celebration of the County’s acquisition of the land in the All Point Bulletin:

“Some relics of the Alaska Packers Association remain, from lilac trees planted around the long-gone manager’s house, to the old water tank and remaining pilings. Bean said less obvious relics told the story of a more ancient and long-lived tribal fishery that thrived at Lily Point for generations before being displaced by the cannery and the fish traps.

“The cannery came in 1917 and they chose this location because they could see the native peoples were making quite a haul here. Sadly they disrupted how things had been for a very long time,” Bean said.”

Here’s what the Nature Conservancy’s Spring issue of Washington Wildlands said about the same topic: ‘The Conservancy plans to work with the Whatcom County parks department and other partners to restore the site, including removal of pilings, slag, and debris from the tidelands so they’ll no longer impede the sediment from reaching the beaches of Lily Point and western Boundary Bay. Ultimately, Whatcom County Parks will manage the site for recreation and conservation.’’

What we’ve got here, I suspect, is several different ideas about what the Lily Point acquisition was/is about. For some, it was preserving forested land from development; for some it was providing additional recreation facilities; for some it was restoring an ecological system. For some, it included preserving important historical and cultural phenomena. I doubt very seriously that Governor Gregoire or Whatcom County cared at all about preventing development in Point Roberts, per se, or preserving historical markers of the APA Cannery. I suspect that County and State marine biologists are largely motivated by the idea that they will now be able to “restore” the ecology of some tiny part of Puget Sound. I think this might require some careful working out of different and--one might hope—ultimately overlapping agendas.

Here are some pictures of the pilings remaining from the APA Cannery at Lily Point. It’s hard to imagine that the pilings themselves, none of them very large after almost a hundred years, constitute some major impediment to Puget Sound’s integrity, though. I guess that’s my opening position.