SURPRISE! Commerce Department gave $500,000 more to San Juans for ferry relief

Sunday, December 22, 2024
Written Summary by Jeff Noedel
Video Directed by Jeremy Tyler

An EXCLUSIVE SanJuans.Today VIDEO IS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE

In this SanJuans.Today interview of San Juan County Council Chair Jane Fuller, Jeff Noedel poses questions for 35 minutes about how the County intends to spend $1.5 million ($500,000 more than the expected $1 million) granted by the Washington Department of Commerce to mitigate the stressors of canceled sailings by Washington State Ferries. The grant was ordered by Governor Jay Inslee, who announced the grant in person in Friday Harbor on Tuesday, September 17, 2024. SanJuans.Today coverage of that announcement is here.

On September 17, Inslee announced a $1 million grant from the State Commerce Department plus an estimated additional spend of $500,000 (now $600,000) from the Governor’s Office emergency budget that will allow Washington State Ferries’ Inter-island service to run on weekends through the winter. Historically, the inter-island service has stopped on weekends in the winter. By running the inter-island service year-around on weekends, the hope is that it may be easier to recruit local employees who live in the San Juans to work for WSF and the inter-island route year-around.

So the original “emergency spend” by the state was to be $1.5 million; $1 million from Commerce and $500,000 (now $600,000) by WSF. County leaders were recently surprised when Commerce found an additional $500,000, so now the total “emergency spend” in the San Juans is $2.1 million total.

The interview begins with Jeff observing that the direct appeal in July for emergency funds from the Governor was a big political gamble, which appears to have paid off.

At 4:00 minutes into the interview, County Council Rep Fuller congratulated the committee that helped WSF write an updated ferry schedule for San Juan routes. She said, “I want to give a shout-out to 25 Washington State Ferries’ task force members from our county who wrote a new schedule for winter. And it’s being launched on the 29th of December. And, we’re looking forward to feedback from the community if that schedule works for them. The schedule hadn’t been updated in 15 years. And the task force, members rather have worked on rewriting the schedule for a year and a half. That’s 25 volunteers from our county and also a couple from Anacortes, to come up with a new schedule for our our ridership

(6:00) The new experimental programs being developed by the County will not include a foot ferry to Bellingham. Not now anyway.

(8:00) The new program will be “a more robust” version of Tom Bridge’s current foot ferry/water taxi service. It will only run when WSF inter-island service goes offline.

(10:10) The second program being developed by the County will be a foot ferry service from the four WSF-served islands to Anacortes. This service will make a round trip twice a day and will run five or seven days a week, even when WSF is running normal service.

(14:30) The third service the County is developing is an inter-island barge service that will run during WSF inter-island shortages, and possibly other times, too.

(17:30) An interesting conversation about a concept of dedicated foot ferries for school kids — “water school buses.” But such a program will not be part of the County programs being developed at this time.

(21:45) While important studies have been done in the past, and two important studies are being conducted now, there is great value in these emergency-funded programs learning from experiments on the water now.

(24:25) A shout-out to the great research work conducted by Ed Andrews.

A promised link to the Community Water Taxi research is here.

(25:20) Jeff reminds, “It’s also important, to note that nobody is declaring victory. This is not over. The problems are not over. We don’t have any more new (WSF) boats. New vessels… We’re probably one crew or one boat away from another series of disastrous weekends. And we did have this little reminder this past weekend.”

(28:00) Fuller recently learned of one more thing Inslee did on his way out that may be very helpful to the San Juans Inter-island route. It will require lobbying in the legislature to make Inslee’s last gift to the San Juans stick through the appropriations process.

(34:20) Wrapping up, Jeff and Rep. Fuller recognize Captain Tom Bridge for perhaps being the single person whose work led to this major success.