Dingler leads effort to revive Coastal Coalition
With common issues such as storm and tsunami protection, shoreline erosion, and maintaining aging infrastructure, a Coastal Coalition of Central Washington cities is starting to form anew to build common ground with the state Legislature and federal government.
Ocean Shores Mayor Crystal Dingler, now the senior mayor in all of Grays Harbor, recently spearheaded an effort to restore the Coastal Coalition that often banded together during past legislative sessions to rally around common issues and needs. With new mayors in Aberdeen, Hoquiam, Montesano and Westport, Dingler said she took the initiative to bring the group back together. The coalition once included officials from Pacific County, as well as Grays Harbor Count and the Port of Grays Harbor.
“It’s getting all of those people together,” Dingler said. Most recently, she has been working with Grays Harbor County Commissioner Vickie Raines to rebuild the coalition.
Of particular concern in Ocean Shores is coastal erosion, where the city has recently seen as much as 10-30 feet of shoreline lost to storm and high-surf damage this year on both the ocean side of the peninsula and on the Grays Harbor side south of the Marina and Damon Point.
Dingler said the strength of the storms will continue to increase and she told the City Council the coalition was one way to prepare for how to prepare for the impact. A revived Coastal Coalition, Dingler added, could propose specific legislation or projects to tackle issues such as coastal resiliency, impacts from coastal warming and climate change, or how to combat a rising sea level.
“We’re seeing so much erosion right now,” Dingler said, noting the south end by the jetty has “lost three feet of sand” in recent storms, triggering the most recent emergency response by the Army Corps of Engineers to replace the sand with rocks.
While communities such as Aberdeen and Hoquiam face different problems with river flooding and tidal erosion, the common ground is economic development as well a preservation of the infrastructure and personal property for homeowners. “We’re kind of under the gun here,” Dingler said. “It’s economic development. It’s everything.”
The intent is to help all the coastal communities have projects ready to go to meet the needed improvements and hopefully prevent emergencies from happening down the road. One of the key strategies will be to have projects matched up with available grants at the federal and state level.
“I think we need to be proactive and go after it,” Dingler said.
One of the key state issues the mayor hopes to pursue is a bill (House Bill 2296) that would extend the ability of Public Facility Districts to collect a state sales tax rebate from 25 years to 40 years. It would also allow the districts, such as the one that oversees the Ocean Shores Convention Center, to use the sales tax rebates to “improve, rehabilitate and expand their existing facilities.” The City Council recently passed a resolution in support of the House bill.
“This would give us an opportunity to have that money for capital projects and use that money for the Convention Center,” Dingler said.
The Coastal Coalition already has had its first meeting, and first goal is to look for seed money to get started with a “wish list” of priority projects to propose at the state and federal level. The effort also is supported by U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer’s office, and Dingler and Raines intend to enlist the support of the Grays Harbor Council of Governments, which also includes the Quinault Indian Nation and already handles common transportation issues.
“There are so many issues on the water right now,” Dingler said, “we don’t want to miss the boat.
”Newly elected Councilman Jon Martin said he thought the coalition effort was a good idea: “One of the things that Ocean Shores needs to do as a city is to be more politically connected outside of the city.”
Source: The Daily World