2020 Year in Review - Port of Whitman County
From our first-ever virtual Port Commission meeting to the retirement of our longstanding Commissioner John Love, 2020 has been full of defining changes.
Some were the result of strategic, long-range planning, while others were brought on by the unexpected: a global pandemic.
For the first time in our 62-year history, we moved our board room entirely online to meet the new COVID-19 restrictions. Like other government agencies, we learned to bring our Port Commission meetings to the community, rather than vice versa, as we no longer had doors to open.
We also celebrated the career of our longest-serving Commissioner, John Love, who retired after 24 years of service to Whitman County. While bittersweet, this change led us to welcoming Karl Webber to a seat on our board.
The Port also moved forward on several key projects in 2020:
- Along with five other ports, we formed Petrichor Broadband, a publicly owned LLC dedicated to solving broadband issues across Washington State. Our other members include Port of Kalama, Port of Ridgefield, Port of Skagit County and Port of Pasco.
- We signed an IRU agreement with Ziply Fiber to expand broadband access to Rosalia, Tekoa, Oakesdale, Garfield and Palouse. As of December 2020, the cities of Rosalia and Palouse have been designed and are in the permitting processes, and the other three towns are on track to have completed designs by the end of the month. The Ziply Fiber partnership allows the Port to save about $1.5 million toward the fiber-to-the-home network. These savings will be redirected to fiber extensions in the rural areas around Tekoa, Lamont, Oakesdale, Garfield, Farmington and Plaza in 2021.
- We welcomed a new tenant to Pullman Industrial Park, Veterinary Medical Research & Development. VMRD is working on innovative solutions in the fight against COVID-19, including a new testing approach to safely keep businesses open.
- We completed improvements to Port of Whitman Business Air Center, Pullman Industrial Park-West, Boyer Park & Marina and Port of Central Ferry.
- Individual Commissioners and the Port as an agency participated in a public comment period determining the fate of the lower Snake River dams. Along with many of the cities and towns across Whitman County, we submitted comments on the Columbia-Snake River System Draft Environmental Impact Statement. We also encouraged others to do so, and thanks to robust participation, welcomed the federal agencies’ decision to keep these critical dams in operation.
- We redesigned our Port plans – the 2016-2020 Strategic Plan and Comprehensive Scheme of Harbor Improvements – to better convey our strategic goals. We also published our first-ever report card to assess our progress toward meeting these objectives.
- We published this new website and blog to keep you better informed of the Port’s work in real time – outside of our regular meetings on the first and third Thursdays of the month.
It’s difficult to condense a year like 2020. If you’d like to read more about what we accomplished this year, please explore our 2016-2020 Comprehensive Plan Report Card.
About the Author: Kristine Meyer is the District 2 Commissioner of the Port of Whitman County.
