P.S., the engagement’s off

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

P.S., THE ENGAGEMENT’S OFF: Like the letter that follows a bad breakup, a federal report confesses, yes, NOAA could have treated her suitors better, but she never really loved Bellingham in the first place.

The process by which the federal government decided to move National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ships from Seattle to Oregon was deeply flawed, the report notes, but the errors are probably not enough to have changed the ultimate decision. The report doesn’t reference Bellingham’s offer to host the marine agency’s Pacific research fleet, focusing instead on NOAA’s failure to adequately consider federally controlled waterfronts near the fleet’s current Lake Union pier in Seattle.

Sen. Maria Cantwell and other members of Washington’s congressional delegation had protested NOAA’s selection of Newport, Ore., for the fleet’s new home, urging the U.S. Commerce Department’s inspector general to review the selection process. In a reply to Cantwell last week, inspectors admitted they “are unable to provide assurance that NOAA’s award of the lease to the Port of Newport provided the most cost-effective solution… for the government.” The report detailed “errors and weaknesses,” and said the agency may have found a cheaper site if it had been willing to split up the fleet and had looked closer at existing federal facilities.

“NOAA did not adequately, in our view, consider federal facilities, such as use of federally owned space at NOAA’s Western Regional Center or space available at the Federal Center South,” the IG wrote, concluding “the missteps that were identified are sufficiently numerous and serious to raise questions about the quality, integrity, and oversight of NOAA’s real property procurement processes.”

The report shows that NOAA’s commanding officer in Seattle argued for keeping the ships and staff where they are, or at a government-owned Duwamish riverfront property off East Marginal Way in Seattle, or even property (lamentably farther inland for an ocean research fleet) at Sand Point facilities on Lake Washington. Indeed, one enduring criticism of the agency’s move to Oregon’s remote southern coast is the physical distance created between fleet operations and the fleet’s research personnel. Last winter, a number of the agency’s civilian specialists expressed concerns over housing, schools and similar expectations NOAA termed “quality of life issues” the specialists believed would be diminished in the remote seaside community.

Perhaps most troubling in the report, Newport appears to be a late addition to the list of sites being considered, with an unclear path describing how the southern seaport managed to climb to the top of the list. The original study area extended from Bellingham to Portland and Astoria, and “the rationale for extending the delineated geographic area down the Oregon coast to Newport is unclear,” the IG noted.

Too, the selection process itself seems to have been a moving target, with “an overly complex and convoluted rating method,” the IG found. “The method was difficult to understand and use in the evaluation, and it appears to have been only loosely applied as described in the solicitation.”

Criteria added late in the selection process placed strong emphasis on new pier facilities, the construction of which the state of Oregon agreed to help underwrite. The new emphasis gave the appearance—the IG noted—NOAA was trying to “gear” the award to a specific offer in a rigged outcome.

“The IG is saying there were serious flaws in NOAA’s process prior to the competition, and had those steps that NOAA is required by law and policy to follow been followed, the outcome very well may have changed,” Cantwell said.

In the end, however, the report noted that even with the errors and weaknesses in the search, Newport would have still been awarded the contract because two of three other possible locations had leasing costs that exceeded NOAA’s lease authority. And while the third—Bellingham—was within NOAA’s lease authority, it was more expensive than Newport and received a lower technical rating.

Untold, though, is the opportunity the Port of Bellingham had early on, after fire damaged the NOAA pier on Lake Union and Seattle property owners—at the height of the real estate bubble—high-handedly sought a more lucrative tenant for their lakefront holdings, before multiple applications were solicited in a post-­bubble competitive bid that included a hungrier Seattle, to leverage port allies and make a quiet, canny bid to homeport the fleet under conditions similar to those in the mid-’80s that allowed Bellingham to collect the southern terminus for the Alaska Marine Highway system from an indifferent Seattle.

One wonders what an independent audit might look like of the port’s own efforts to acquire the NOAA contract—from the agency’s failure to employ powerful and willing insider channels; to the callow manner the agency rebuffed offers by third parties (senators, mayors, business and civic leaders) to draft endorsements and recommendations to site the research fleet here, preferring instead the port’s own insular (and lackluster) “Get NOAA” campaign; to the port’s cross-purposes efforts to decommission Whatcom Waterway as a federal channel; to the letter port commissioners cc’d to NOAA, declaring war with the City of Bellingham; to the agency’s astonishing unwillingness to help under­write a competitive bid to construct NOAA’s pier facilities; to the clumsy hesitance that tempted commissioners to nearly fail to file their appeal (only the pleas of those rebuffed prominent third parties coaxed penny-pinching commissioners to rethink their reluctance); to the delay in filing that appeal that allowed Oregon to push forward more fully with groundbreaking and to mobilize the state’s own congressional response. The report might read like a bad movie script featuring some boozy stumblebum, bellowing that he “coulda been a contender” while his girl walks out on him.

As the search for a new director for the port authority narrows, perhaps a humbler agency can begin to search its own heart for a new, creative, more cooperative path to the redevelopment of Bellingham’s central waterfront. Even the story of a jilted love might have a happy ending.