The Marine Terminal is an artifact of Olympia’s industrial past

Here’s a suggestion about what to do with it

By Joe Illing in The Jolt News:

Here’s an alternative

To see one such alternative just drive north to Granville Island in Vancouver, BC. The similarities between it and our port peninsula are striking.

• They both share an industrial past.
• They both dredged their surrounding waters and expanded their land mass with its fill from 1911 through 1915.
• They both welcomed manufacturing industries in the early 1920s and prospered through a couple of world wars well into the mid-century. Then new economies, new methods of transportation and new ways of doing business changed old business models.

And that’s when the shared destinies of these two entities diverged. In the 1970s the Canadians decided to bid adieu to the industrial use of the island and welcomed market activities. Today Granville Island, with half the land mass of the port peninsula, is alive with activity … and prosperity. Today that island boasts 275 businesses that employ more than 2,500 people. It generates more than $215 million in economic activity each year, and fills Vancouver’s tax coffers to overflowing.

The Port of Olympia’s Marine Terminal, however, stuck with its out-of-date business model. It posts predictably disappointing results annually. If you compare our peninsula with Vancouver’s Granville Island you must inevitably conclude that the terminal is not serving its community well.

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