Bellingham Comments from Digital Recorder - EISs for the Proposed ...

GATEWAY PACIFIC TERMINAL EIS SCOPING HEARING VOL. II
COURT REPORTER: BETH DRUMMOND PROCEEDING DATE: October 27, 2012
Page 148
1 I've been on this Cherry Point issue since about
2 the year 2000. We came to Bellingham in 1996. I know about
3 all the other schemes that have been proposed out there. I
4 served on the -- on the committee to implement the Shoreline
5 Management Act that was passed in 1971 for the City of
6 Bellingham. I've incurred -- I was recently on the
7 committee, the DNR Committee to write up a management
8 proposal for Cherry Point.
9 I just want to briefly mention a couple of things
10 that have come to mind that I don't think have been dealt
11 with today. The first one is that under the Shoreline
12 Management Act that was passed in 1971, one of the
13 stipulations was to increase public access.
14 There was also legal passage of implications for
15 the Public Trust Doctrine that was declared back in, I
16 think, 1812 under the British common law; that the water;
17 the air belongs to the people. We need to focus on that a
18 little bit more in our discussion of this issue.
19 Personally, I'm an old-time naturalist, so I've
20 been on the ground. I walked the beach many times from
21 Point White -- (Alarm sounds.)
22 Oh, dear. Okay. The other one quickly was the
23 political accountability that maybe some of this group can
24 deal with, which is the question of:
25 If this happens, should it not be under a port