Crews are constructing a trades education facility at Oregon Coast Community College‘s campus in Newport.

The 22,000-square-foot Oregon Coast Advanced Technology & Trades (OCATT) Center is expected to cost approximately $30 million, according to Dave Price, vice president of engagement at the college. Officials are drawing money from a $33 million bond approved by Lincoln County voters in May 2024 as well as an $8 million contribution from the state approved by the Oregon Legislature.

The project team consists of architect partners GLAS Architects of Eugene and Hacker, civil engineer Mazzetti, structural engineer KPFF, and general contractor Lease Crutcher Lewis.

Staffers in the OCATT Center will provide hands-on training in construction and carpentry, HVAC systems, welding, industrial facility maintenance, and maritime technology. Also, pre-apprenticeship programs will be expanded from once a year to year-round.

Although the college currently has 16 workspaces at its Port of Toledo welding lab, it does not have sufficient linear space for pipe fitting instruction. The new building will fill that void.

Construction/carpentry will be a new program for the college.

“There’s some interesting things happening in the local high schools that we’re working very closely with (Lincoln County) School District so that we’re not being duplicative, and we’re building on what they’re doing,” Price said.

The OCATT Center will have four primary workspaces: a build lab, a mechanical lab, an electronic lab, and a “dirty build” lab for metalwork, welding and work on diesel engines. The build lab will have a wet area for aquaculture work tied to the Aquarium Science building.

Spaces in the OCATT Center will be able to accommodate a variety of uses. The plan is for programming to shift according to the changing market demands of the area, Price said, so the spaces can be used for decades.

“Flexibility has been crucial from day one when we pitched this as a proposal to the voters,” he said.

Oregon Coast Community College also may adjust its programming in consideration of what’s being offered at other coastal colleges.

“When Tillamook Bay or Clatsop rolls out a new program or another new facility that their taxpayers provide, we want to be mindful of the fact that we don’t want to all be competing in the same space,” Price said.

Future programming in Newport could include aquaculture, maritime welding, commercial diving and welding, and more. College officials do not want to pursue a new program if there is not at least 10 years of potential capacity for businesses in the region to hire those students so they can leverage their education into good paying jobs, Price said.

The OCATT Center will be able to receive a lot of natural light through glazing at both the front and back. The exterior building material will be metal siding with slate green chevrons in a random design. Exposed mass timber will jut out under the roofline, as well as in the interior space. The inside will also feature white walls.

“It’s not going to be kind of dark and metal inside like what you might expect for an industrial building,” Price said. “We really want this to be a bright, modern learning space.”

A roll-up glass door will allow space for a truck to enter or a boat to be dropped off inside. That will let students work indoors on large vehicles or vessels.

The new facility will be across from the Aquarium Science building. The two buildings’ roof lines will slope down toward each other, Price said.

Construction of the OCATT Center is under way. In November and December, the lot was cleared and graveled. Trenching has been ongoing. Last week, workers started pouring foundations and footings, and walls will not be far behind, Price said.

The facility is expected to open in fall 2027.

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By TOM BANSE
Northwest News Network

NEWPORT, Ore. (AP) — Hot housing markets in major cities like Seattle and Portland have pushed the cities to regulate short-term rentals like Airbnb. But small Pacific Northwest towns popular with visitors are also struggling to balance the growth of Airbnb-type rentals with a tight housing supply.

Newport is a beach town on the central coast known for its working waterfront, sea lions, lighthouses and aquarium. Now, the town finds itself at the messy intersection of the sharing economy, the tourism business and a housing crunch.

The town has held two meetings so far for residents to ask questions and sound off on short-term rentals.

Sandy Benning came to the first open house last week to support capping the number of short-term vacation rentals available in Newport. Benning said she learned firsthand how tight the housing market on the Oregon coast is when she and her husband moved to Newport two years ago.

“We literally looked for a place to rent for almost 90 days,” Benning said. “That entire time we stayed in VRDs (vacation rental dwellings) around the local area. It was a huge expense for us to stay here over the summer for what, three months, before we found a place to live.”

Benning shares a widely held concern around the Northwest that landlords are converting long-term units for the local workforce into short-term rentals for visitors because the temporary rentals are more lucrative.

“This was something we found repeatedly,” Benning said. “In fact, we ended up having to purchase a home. And the availability of homes for us to purchase was very, very limited.”

Newport resident Carla Perry lives in an oceanfront neighborhood where vacation rentals have proliferated and created what Perry calls “a critical situation.”

“Lots of traffic. Lots of noise. Garbage. Lots of people,” Perry said. “This was a quiet neighborhood. It’s changed that. There are no neighbors. It’s not like you can know who is staying anywhere.”

Perry is part of a citizen advisory committee that came up with options for how Newport could regulate short-term rentals. The alternatives include limits on the number of vacation rentals, their location or density, as well as establishing a complaint hotline.

Newport Community Development Director Derrick Tokos said the committee borrowed ideas from other Northwest places that took a run at this issue recently.

Hood River doesn’t restrict home shares or bed-and-breakfasts where the owner or a manager lives on the premises. Astoria has a limit on the number of rooms that can be rented. Both Cannon Beach and Yachats have caps on short-term rentals, and Durango has a density limit that only allows one short-term vacation rental per block.

“It’s kind of a potpourri,” Tokos said. “They looked at best management practices that a lot of jurisdictions are using. These are all kinda living codes that get updated periodically as jurisdictions try something. Then, ‘Hey, maybe that wasn’t working like we wanted.’ So they make adjustments.”

Newport has a permanent population just over 10,000. Tokos said about 200 properties are currently licensed as vacation rentals.

The push to clamp down comes just as more property owners are looking to list their beach homes with rental management companies. Pete Even, who lives outside of Springfield, Oregon, is in the process of a buying a second home in Newport with hopes of generating some retirement income.

“There’s already enough rules and regulations on the books. They just need to be enforced,” Even said. “We want to do it the right way, but we don’t want to be micromanaged if we’re doing it properly.”

Jon Tesar of Kennewick, Washington, owns a second home in Newport that he’d like to turn into a vacation rental. He’s concerned a cap that’s too restrictive might mess up his plans, not to mention the city’s greater economic prospects.

“If you start to establish yourself as a place that is unfriendly to tourists, it’s a slippery slope,” Tesar said. “You don’t know where it’s going. So if you start restricting the number of tourists that can come in, it just doesn’t seem like it’s good for our economy. You’re wasting the space.”

The Newport City Council will have the final say on what to do after the citizens committee and the planning commission first try to reach consensus where they can.

Newport currently has a fairly basic licensing requirement for vacation rentals that permits them in all zones of the city if adequate parking is available. Nearby Lincoln City last year joined other coastal cities such as Manzanita, Seaside and Gearhart in limiting the number of vacation rentals allowed in residential neighborhoods. Astoria only allows vacation rentals in commercial zones, although an Airbnb search this week showed that restriction is being flouted.

But regulations can also come with consequences. Manzanita’s rules are being challenged in federal court as excessive and unconstitutional by a Washington woman who was fined for accepting money from friends and family who stayed at her second home. In Gearhart, vacation rental proprietors forced a voter referendum on restrictions they considered overly strict, but the rules were upheld at the polls last November.

Vacation rentals are a hot topic on the Washington coast, too.

Long Beach, Washington’s city administrator recently said his community has learned from the experiences of Oregon coastal towns. Long Beach and nearby Ilwaco now strictly prohibit short-term rentals of homes in residential zones unless the property owner obtains a conditional-use permit.

In Ocean Shores, Washington, the city planning commission this spring heard testimony that “hundreds” of short-term rentals are operating in residential areas in likely violation of city codes and probably not paying state and local taxes.

The planning commission continues to study the approaches other places have taken with no action anticipated before autumn.

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After months of unexpected delays, additional costs and redesigns, a new water treatment facility for the Oregon coastal community of Newport is nearing completion.

The $17 million project was supposed to wrap up last summer. But work was delayed after it was found that a dam near an intake station for the project was seismically unstable.

Smaller plant a better fit for Newport’s budget

For a small city, Newport’s new water treatment facility is big, but not as big as originally envisioned.

The city’s original plan called for construction of a plant with a 10-million-gallon capacity to be paid for through a general obligation bond worth $16 million.

That plan ran into the red, however, when designs for the project turned out to be more than the city had set aside for engineering.

With an eye toward pulling the project back in line with its budget, the city and the project team looked at ways to cut costs. Eliminating certain parts of the project ended up reducing the overall capacity of the plant by one-third, but the move allowed the city to save enough in construction costs to bring the project back in line with the money available.

The discovery required a complete redesign of the station at a new location, and gave the project a new completion date of this coming June.

“There was a whole lot of looking back on the past and wishing we had done things differently,” said Tim Gross, Newport public works director. “Picking up from the previous city engineer, there are things I would have done differently.”

The project was originally proposed in 2009 as part of the city’s master water plan to update its water facilities. Although Newport only has a population of around 10,000 residents, the city uses more water than an average city of a similar size because of its high-water-demand fishing and brewing industries.

The city had been relying on a circa-1950 water facility with a 4-million-gallon capacity. The new fully automated facility, which is being built by of Stayton, will be able to handle up to six million gallons of water per day.

“I’m expecting much more consistency in water quality and production,” Gross said. “We’ll have a continuous backwashing system, so I can run the plant with less people and produce more water. From an operational perspective, that’s fantastic.”

The project consisted to two parts. The first focused on construction of a water treatment plant; the second focused on an intake station to pull water from the city’s reservoir. Originally, the city was going to build the intake station on the foundations of the facility’s old intake station, which sat near a dam on the property.

However, when crews started working on the station, they realized the nearby dam was seismically unstable. If a seismic event large enough to cause the ground to liquefy were to occur, the dam might break and wash out the new station.

The realization brought construction to a halt while the team located a new downstream site and worked on a design that would fit that spot.

“We thought we could take the existing intake structure and beef it up to house the new pumps – they’re much heavier and have more torque,” said Verena Winter, waste water engineer for . “The material of the dam was good, but whatever was underneath was just not, according to seismic standards.”

The city tapped into a water contingency fund, a pot of money that had been set aside for emergencies, to cover the $1.2 million cost of conducting geo-seismic tests on the dam and redesigning and building the intake facility.

“They (the city) should have known what soil conditions were in that region before they did the design on that station,” Gross said. “I think those were cost-cutting measures done early in the project. They felt like they had enough information on the existing plant, and it ended up biting the city in the end.”

To avoid further delays on the project, HDR and the city began meeting once a week to discuss the project as it progressed.

“It’s a challenging project but the contractor, us and the city are a good team and working together, so that it made it a lot easier to go through this,” Winter said.

Even with the setbacks, Gross said, the project may end up being a better facility than originally planned.

“Once we realized what kind of condition the dam was in, it gave us the opportunity to go ahead and build the intake station in such a fashion that it could stay where it is even if the dam goes away,” he said. “Yes, it cost us a great deal of money, but if you look at it from the long-term water supply, it was a much better move.”

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While political outcry erupted, workers pushed steadily forward to build a new facility for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Newport. The city last week issued a certificate of occupancy for the last portion of the dock, and remaining work is expected to wrap up this week – a few days ahead of schedule.

Soon after NOAA announced in August 2009 that it intended to move its Marine Operations Center-Pacific from Seattle to Newport, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and others objected. They argued that moving operations to Newport would negatively impact the agency as it pursued its scientific mission. The Port of Bellingham, Wash., another bidder for the center – and approximately 175 jobs – filed a complaint that the planned site in Newport was in a floodplain.

“We had our marching orders that we needed to have most of the project built by May 1, so we just kept digging,” said Brad Barcroft, on-site project manager for Andersen Construction. “We were aware that there had been some heartburn in Washington, and Senator Cantwell had concerns, but after a whole review process they determined everything had been done properly.”

Andersen and West Coast Contractors worked on the project as a joint venture, and only a few miscellaneous items remain.

On land, the facility includes a 25,000-square-foot warehouse and a 17,000-square-foot office building. The office building will hold extensive information technology equipment, which required installation of dry chemical fire suppression systems.

Half of the warehouse will be used for storage, and the other half will house machine, wood and electronic shops. The latter includes a full mock-up of the instruments on board NOAA ships so that technicians based in Newport can communicate easily with those at sea.

The buildings received Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design silver certification, in part because of the team’s decision to crush and reuse the concrete from the warehouse fish hatchery that previously occupied the project site.

After a competitive bidding process, West Coast Contractors won the bid for the dock work, which accounted for about $15 million of the $29.4 construction budget.

“I think it was our knowledge of the project and pre-planning that set us apart,” said Tim Smith, construction manager for the company. “We devised a system for the piling that included very progressive thinking.”

The 1,300-foot-long wharf is connected to land by two, 260-foot-long approach piers. The whole structure is supported by bents comprised of three, 106-foot piles. Each bent is capable of resisting 900,000 pounds.

West Coast Contractors came up with a template for driving the piling one bent at a time, which reduced the need to move the work barge. The wharf provides berths for four NOAA ships and two visiting vessels, as well as moorage for small boats.

The team was challenged to finish in-water work ahead of the Feb. 15 deadline. In addition, the port’s permit obligated workers to harvest and replant eelgrass that would have died when the approach piers cut off their light source. More than 50,000 yards of material had to be moved.

The eelgrass is part of the critical habitat for coho salmon, one of the species that NOAA monitors. In fact, NOAA announced this month that Oregon coast coho salmon should remain listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Transplanting the eelgrass is part of a 10-year process to ensure the facility does not harm the coho habitat.

Operations at the facility will support 65 administrative staffers, and more jobs are expected to be created once the center is running at full capacity.

“They’ll be using local vendors when the ships are in and when they’re out,” said Don Mann, general manager of the Port of Newport for almost 16 years. “The spin-off has already started with five full-time security positions. It will take a while to establish, but the whole region will see some continual growth in job opportunities and vendor activity.”

The formal turnover of the facility and the 20-year lease will begin Friday. A ribbon-cutting ceremony and an official dedication will take place Aug. 20 and 21.

The post Final touches being added to Newport NOAA facility  appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

A few miserable winter days didn’t stop crews from Andersen Construction from a timely finish of the in-water work for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration‘s new Marine Operations Center in Newport.

The project is on track to be finished in time for NOAA to move its Pacific fleet headquarters to the site on May 1, said Don Mann, general manager of the Port of Newport, which owns the facility.

Andersen started the water-based part of the $40 million project on Nov. 10, which was 10 days later than originally planned. But the contractor made up the time through extra shifts and the benefit of generally uneventful winter weather, Mann said.

“There were a couple days of high winds that were somewhat disruptive, but within a couple of weeks they were able to get over that late start,” Mann said. “The project is coming along great. We’re on schedule and on budget. We couldn’t be happier with Andersen.”

The initial delay was caused by a difficult permitting process with several agencies, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the departments of environmental quality and fish and wildlife, he added.

The main concern was that pier pilings and dredging work had to be finished by Feb. 15 in order to avoid disrupting seasonal migration patterns of juvenile Coho salmon in the bay, said Brad Nile, senior project manager for Andersen.

“A year ago we tested the process with five pilings to validate the design and capacity, and with that insight we were able to build confidence that we could do this on time,” Nile said. “We really didn’t have much that slowed us down – although it was pretty miserable for a few of the days.”

Crews installed 146 36-inch main pier pilings and 165 fender pilings, which protect ships and the dock from impacts, as part of the 1,300-foot-long, 58,700-square-foot pier. They also dredged a 28.5-foot-deep channel to allow NOAA’s six research vessels to dock at the site.

Now that water work is complete, the next steps will be to put topping slabs on the docks and to install utilities for ships that will use the site, he said.

“Each of these ships is like a small village, and you have to deliver sewage capacity, potable water and other things to them,” Nile said.

The six berths will also have fire-water systems – essentially dock speak for fire hydrants – and utility lines for cable television, telephones, fiber optics and other systems.

“All that should be wrapped up by the end of April,” Nile said.

One of the interesting project challenges was finding ways to meet agency concerns about the salmon, Nile said.

On part of the site, a floating dock is made of 50 percent transparent material that lets light pass through in an effort to stop predator fish from hiding and preying on young salmon, he said.

On another part of the dock at the approach piers, crews used an epoxy coating mixed with glass beads underneath the pier as a way to reflect light. That strategy was used because of concerns that shading by the dock would interfere with the fish habitat and plants, he said.

“It reflects light off the water and back down onto it under the dock,” Nile said. “That allows some of the underwater vegetation to prosper.”

Because the pilings themselves represented lost fish habitat, the project also required the company to build 1.3 acres of new bay to make up for it, he added.

Nile said that he found those sorts of solutions fascinating.

“In this day and age I guess it’s more common that federal agencies are influencing construction,” Nile said. “There’s no code or mandate anywhere that would ever tell us to do that.”

The overall project is designed to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design silver certification.

The $40 million in funding came from a state lottery bond and from lease revenue bonds, Mann said.

NOAA signed a 20-year lease on the facility in August 2009.

With the funding secure and the lease already signed, the Obama administration’s proposed $366 million cut to NOAA funding, which was announced Monday, shouldn’t affect the project or moving plans, Mann added.

Port of Newport officials expect the facility to add about $19.5 million annually to the local economy after the 65 administrative employees and 110 workers on board the six NOAA ships move to the site, Mann added.

“We’re very excited about the economics of this,” Mann said. “There will be a lot of spin-off and a lot of service jobs that can integrate with this facility.”

The project created between 300 and 400 construction jobs in the area.

Construction of the rest of the NOAA complex includes a warehouse and an office building near the docks. Those buildings are mostly done except for some finishing work with cabinets and flooring, Nile said, adding that he expects to turn power on by the end of the week.

“We’ll start a systems start-up and test in March with the building’s mechanical systems,” Nile said. “The buildings look done, but there are still a few things we have to do before we turn everything on.”

In April, the company will start a two-week flush of air systems before NOAA officially moves its offices to the site on May 1.

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Newport citizens are taking issue with new geological hazard maps that color hazardous zones in red.

During council testimony in November citizens raised concerns that having a piece of property in the red zone could have negative effects on property value, said Derrick Tokos, Newport‘s Community Development Director. The citizens requested the color coding be changed to gray scale.

Newport City Council will make the final decision on the maps, and the hazard ordinance as a whole, at its meeting Dec. 6.

According to Tokos, it’s a relatively simple compromise. He expects the council to focus more on what to do when development occurs on property zoned moderately hazardous.

“These are really the last issues that the council needs to work out before moving forward,” he said. “We are confident that once they are resolved this thing will move forward.”

The ordinance would replace hazard maps from 1977 with the updated 2007 State Department of Geology and Mineral Industries maps. While the color coding on the maps would be removed from any documents for the city of Newport, the red color coding would remain at the state level.

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Workers from Andersen Construction are busy driving the first pier pilings and preparing equipment for the start of dredging at the new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Marine Operations Center in Newport.

Work that began in June on parking facilities and two main buildings at the $40 million center should be finished in March, about a month ahead of schedule, and the pier should be finished on time by Feb. 15 – despite a 10-day delay in the water work permit, said Brad Nile, senior project manager for Andersen, the site’s main contractor.

“The real thrust of the project, now that the building scope is well in hand, is that on Nov. 10 at 5 p.m. we received our water work permit from the Army Corps of Engineers,” Nile said. “They tell me it was issued in record time, considering the work.”

The permit brought together the Corps of Engineers with several agencies, including the departments of Environmental Quality and Fish and Wildlife, which were concerned about protecting juvenile Coho salmon in the bay.

All underwater work must be done between Nov. 1 and Feb. 15 because that time frame will be the least disruptive to the fish, Nile said.

The permit was one of two major challenges facing the project as it heads into the winter months, said Don Mann, general manager of the Port of Newport, which owns the facility and will lease it to NOAA.

“The other challenge will be the weather,” Mann said. “We’ll probably have to ask for an extension after Feb. 15 if the weather is bad, but we’ll see how things go.”

Nile said he doesn’t think the deadline will be a problem. He said his company is dedicated to finishing the dock on time despite the shortened window and possible weather problems.

“It will be finished on time, we really don’t have a choice,” Nile said. “If that means working some Saturdays or Sundays out of the gate, then that’s what we’re going to do.”

As soon as the company got the permit, workers started underwater demolition of an old fish ladder, mooring and a dock from a salmon farm that used to occupy the site. They also began installing a mile-long submerged pipe that will transport sediment from the hydraulic dredger to a disposal location.

Dredging should begin this week, once the pipe is fully installed, and should take two to three weeks to complete, Nile said.

It will create a 28.5-foot-deep channel so NOAA’s six research vessels can dock at the site, Mann said.

“We’re actually approved up to 30 feet,” Mann said. “But the ships are really not all that big.”

After dredging is finished, crews will install 141 main pier pilings and 162 fender pilings, which protect ships and the dock from impacts, as part of the 1,300-foot-long pier.

Land operations at the center are also moving along smoothly, Nile and Mann said.

Exterior work on the two main buildings at the site – a 20,000-square-foot office and 26,000-square-foot warehouse – is finished and both buildings are weather tight with roofs and windows installed, Nile said.

What remains now is some drywall, electrical work, wiring, heating and air condition and other internal work, Mann said.

“They can do that inside while the weather is bad,” Mann said.

Work should be complete on those buildings by the end of March, a little over a month ahead of schedule, Nile said.

“The buildings are LEED Silver and so we want to give everybody enough time to get all the little details involved in that on track,” Nile said.

About half of the center’s parking areas are paved, as well, he said.

NOAA signed a 20-year lease on the facility in August 2009. The facility must be complete by May 1, 2011 and the agency plans to occupy the building soon after.

Funds for the $40 million in construction came from a lottery bond from the state and from lease revenue bonds, Mann said.

The project has created between 300 and 400 construction jobs in the area. When the center is finished, it will house 65 administrative employees and be home base for about 110 workers on NOAA ships, Mann said.

“We anticipate economic benefits from the center as well,” Mann said. “For the overall coastal region for our area we’re looking at $19.5 million a year return on the facility – and some people are saying that’s a low estimate.”

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It’s been one year, one week and one day since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration signed a 20-year lease with the Port of Newport to move its Pacific fleet and operations to the central Oregon coast town.

Yet as the walls begin to be erected on the two-story office and warehouse that will house the federal organization, the move is still being opposed by politicians in Washington state, the current lame duck home to NOAA.

Yesterday Washington’s two U.S. senators and seven of the nine U.S. house members to Jeffrey Zients, acting chair of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, asking Zients and the entire Obama Administration to intervene. The letter cites the process of selecting Newport as flawed, and calling the move a waste of taxpayer money.

Now this isn’t the first time, or the second time, or the third time, that Sen. Maria Cantwell and the government in Washington state have opposed the move. And I’m sure it’s not the last.

While I understand the hard feelings over losing a federal lease at the current home of the organization on Lake Washington in Seattle, and the 175 employees that are employed at the facility, it might be time to give it up.

Maybe, well, obviously, I’m biased toward Oregon and the Oregon Coast. But it just seems like Cantwell is trying to spark a fight that can’t be won. Even after Todd Zinser, inspector general for the U.S. Department of Commerce, released a report in late June, which was compiled at the request of Cantwell, he confirmed that even though there were errors in the process, Newport would’ve still been selected.

I know Cantwell represents and is paid to fight for Washington. But this fight is over, and keeping it going is costing taxpayers and creating bad relations between two states that for years have been somewhat inseparable.

The post For NOAA center, Washington state fighting a fight it can’t win appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

It’s been one year, one week and one day since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration signed a 20-year lease with the Port of Newport to move its Pacific fleet and operations to the central Oregon coast town.

Yet as the walls begin to be erected on the two-story office and warehouse that will house the federal organization, the move is still being opposed by politicians in Washington state, the current lame duck home to NOAA.

Yesterday Washington’s two U.S. senators and seven of the nine U.S. house members to Jeffrey Zients, acting chair of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, asking Zients and the entire Obama Administration to intervene. The letter cites the process of selecting Newport as flawed, and calling the move a waste of taxpayer money.

Now this isn’t the first time, or the second time, or the third time, that Sen. Maria Cantwell and the government in Washington state have opposed the move. And I’m sure it’s not the last.

While I understand the hard feelings over losing a federal lease at the current home of the organization on Lake Washington in Seattle, and the 175 employees that are employed at the facility, it might be time to give it up.

Maybe, well, obviously, I’m biased toward Oregon and the Oregon Coast. But it just seems like Cantwell is trying to spark a fight that can’t be won. Even after Todd Zinser, inspector general for the U.S. Department of Commerce, released a report in late June, which was compiled at the request of Cantwell, he confirmed that even though there were errors in the process, Newport would’ve still been selected.

I know Cantwell represents and is paid to fight for Washington. But this fight is over, and keeping it going is costing taxpayers and creating bad relations between two states that for years have been somewhat inseparable.

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A federal report released on Tuesday upholds the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s decision to move its Pacific fleet and operations from Seattle to Newport.

But the report, released by Todd Zinser, inspector general for the U.S. Department of Commerce, also made clear that the process in which Newport was selected had errors and weaknesses in it.

According to the report, NOAA limited its consideration to only areas that allowed the organization to consolidate all of its facilities into one location, even though it could have been cheaper to have them in various locations. Also, the report mentioned that NOAA didn’t take into consideration the use of federally owned space, which could have also saved the agency money.

The report came after Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, requested the inspector general review how the contract was awarded to Newport. Cantwell, chair of the subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard, has continuously contested NOAA’s decision to select Newport over three cities in Washington.

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

The news bodes well for Newport considering construction of the new facilities has been under way since last fall when NOAA originally signed a 20-year renewable lease for the property.

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