A deluge of issues inundated discussions over the Port of Port Townsend’s intent to purchase the Short’s Family Farm at last week’s workshop on the proposal.

In October, the port announced it had entered into a non-binding “Letter of Intent” with the owners of the farm, Roger and Sandy Short, to negotiate terms and price by Jan. 28, 2023.

More than halfway to that date, the port has made progress on its assessment, but is still waiting for a state-mandated appraisal in order to make an offer.

While the final purchase price is subject to negotiation, the port previously estimated it will be in excess of $2 million.

PEAKS AND VALLEYS

There is plenty to muddle how final numbers get crunched.

“There’s a lot of complexity here,” said Eron Berg, the port’s executive director. “There’s some challenges that have been persistent over decades.”

The land has a storied history.

Started in 1945 as a dairy, the farm sits on 253 acres making it one of the largest privately held contiguous pieces of agricultural land.

It is fated to stay that way in perpetuity because in 2016 the Shorts signed a conservation easement managed by the Jefferson Land Trust that prevents the farm from ever being subdivided or converted from agriculture.

“Our mission is to help the community preserve open space, working lands, and habitat forever,” said Erik Kingfisher, the property’s stewardship director from Jefferson Land Trust.

“We’re really focused on perpetuity and protection of lands from conversion and development so that their conservation values can be taken care of and realized for future generations.”

The easement limits what can be done to or on the land, prohibiting a wide swath of uses.

One of the most restrictive rules is that only 2 percent of the property can be covered with impervious surfaces such as buildings and paved or gravel roads and parking lots.

And that 2 percent can only be within specified “building envelopes” around the edges of the property.

“We’re at somewhere around 1.8 percent of the 2 percent that’s permitted,” Kingfisher said. “It’s relatively built-out as a property. But, that being said, a lot of these structures aren’t too functional anymore.”

The uses that are permitted are mostly agricultural in nature with a few additional exceptions.

A particularly unique use that was negotiated by the Shorts was hunting rights.

The farm is the only place in east Jefferson County where hunters can get a reservation to hunt waterfowl, and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife even approached the Shorts previously to try and buy the land in the years before the family was ready to sell.

“[Department of Fish and Wildlife] has reached out to the port a couple of times and expressed a real interesting in maintaining access to this property for seasonal waterfowl hunting,” Berg said.

FLOODING THE MARKET

The abundance of waterfowl in the area is in part due to the another complicating issue: flooding.

“The drainage out there and the flooding is a system-wide reality,” Kingfisher said.

Almost a mile of Chimacum Creek runs through the middle of the property.

“It’s a straight line and then we have virtually no vertical relief,” Kingfisher said.

About a hundred years ago, engineers built ditches that forced Chimacum Creek into that straight line. And for a time, they maintained the drainage.

“That maintenance stopped in the ‘50s and then it became a problem,” Kingfisher said.

Cue canary grass.

“Reed canary grass showed up and started clogging the whole system,” Kingfisher said.

In the 1970s, the drainage system was reactivated then once again abandoned by the commissioners at the time, Kingfisher said.

Since then, the Shorts have maintained the drainage on their own.

“That has stopped and now we’re seeing more flooding than ever,” Kingfisher said.

The flat valley land has a natural inclination to flooding, but the combination of straight lining and canary grass has caused problems with surface water.

“A little bit of flooding is OK for that farmland, but six months of flooding can really compromise the ability of those soils to be productive,” Kingfisher said.

Port Commissioner Pete Hanke raised the idea of planting trees to shade out the canary grass — which is the most common and effective method of control — but Kingfisher noted that it is unknown whether trees could survive the six months of flooding the land currently experiences.

And trees pose threats of their own.

“A simple trunk of a tree in the creek can raise the level of the creek a couple inches and that can flood 100 acres,” Kingfisher said.

TILLERS OF THE COMMUNITY

Despite these issues, the port is still very much interested in acquiring the property.

“This is the first time since the ‘40s since an opportunity like this has knocked on the public’s door and it could be the last time for the next several generations,” Berg said.

Amongst the public, support seems more split.

“I’ve received a lot of verbal comments supporting this, but we have received a lot of letters with a lot of very thoughtful questions,” said Port Commissioner Pam Petranek.

Even the question of how the port would manage the land is still up in the air.

“We will not have a fundamentally satisfactory answer to that because the farm plan process that I imagine we would undertake is probably a year-long process that will need to happen after the decision to acquire,” Berg said.

To facilitate more discussion, the port will be holding a community meeting at the Chimacum Grange at 6 p.m. Tuesday,
Jan. 17.

“The real reason we wanted to do this meeting at the grange is to bring area farmers together,” Hanke said. “There are a lot of people who have been there for a long time that have a lot of skepticism about what is going on.”

“We want the farmers to feel that they are the most important ones in this room,” Petranek said.