Competitive bids for County’s pilot ferry programs were due Friday – Winning bids will be chosen from multiple bidders
Monday, March 17, 2025
by Jeff Noedel
Back on September 17 of 2024 — an overcast Tuesday — a buoyant Governor Jay Inslee swept into Friday Harbor’s Brickworks Event Center and announced that he had caused $1.5 million in state emergency funds to flow to San Juan County government. The purpose of the funds was to help the San Juans cope with canceled sailings in the Washington State Ferry system.
The original “emergency spend” by the state was to be $1.5 million; $1 million from Commerce and $500,000 (later raised to $600,000) by WSF.
The $600,000 has been going to WSF to enable weekend service on the inter-island route through the winter. In past years, weekend service had been cut during the winter to save money. But an unintended consequence was to make the inter-island route less attractive to WSF employees, making it harder to staff. So Governor Inslee aimed to fix that, and Governor Ferguson seems inclined to keep that policy and its added cost in place.
The $1 million from the state’s Commerce Department was open-ended. The Commerce Department empowered the County to be innovative, within parameters and oversight by the Olympia-based agency.
Weeks after Inslee’s visit, County leaders were surprised when Commerce found an additional $500,000 and added it to the San Juan County grant, so now the total available for innovative pilot projects is $1.5 million.
The San Juan County Council and County staff spent the next five months in a two-step process. First, the Council settled on three programs it wanted to fund:
- inter-island emergency walk-on service during WSF outages
- small barge service for commercial and governmental trucks during WSF outages, and
- a daily scheduled walk-on round-trip service between the islands and Anacortes
The second step was for county staff to create Requests For Proposal, or bids, to operate those services by local captains and entrepreneurs. The process of writing the RFPs took many weeks.
The bids were due to the County Friday, and multiple bids were received for at least one of the three services. But winners were not announced in Monday’s working session of the County Council. It is possible winners will be announced in Tuesday’s regular session of the County Council.
Governor Inslee’s $1.5 million emergency grant is set to expire June 30. But some County Council members are confident that Governor Bob Ferguson will extend the emergency grant out of the governor’s budget, and Ferguson’s Commerce Department will extend their $1.5 million grant.
