The Port of Olympia appointed 10 new members for the Port’s Citizen Advisory Committee during a meeting held on Monday, December 12.
The new members are:
The Port had to adopt a resolution increasing the maximum number of members in the committee to 17 before confirming the new members. The committee rules only allowed up to 13 members, with a minimum of nine members.
The committee only had four members, so with ten new members, they exceeded their maximum membership by one person.
Instead of rejecting one of the applicants, the interview committee decided to expand the maximum number of members to accommodate the 14th member and to encourage more people from diverse backgrounds to join the committee.
The interview committee was comprised of committee chair Deborah Pattin, Port commissioner Amy Evans Harding, and Port executive director Sam Gibboney.
“We upped it to 17 because we do want to leave a couple of spots available to increase more diversity,” Evans Harding said. “We'd like to see people of color. We'd like to see people from labor or other jobs that the port works with different things.”
“We have some homogeneity in the group,” Evans Harding commented.
Port commissioner Joe Downing said he only supported the increase of members because Pattin led the committee. With ten new members, he said that the Port commission needs to find a new way to utilize the committee.
“I would say that we really need a different way of using the POCAC in order to utilize this many people,” Downing said.
Evans Harding said that they plan to use the committee to seek public input instead of lobbying for new projects as they have done so before.
“We can task them with giving us more public feedback,” she said, adding, “Vision 2050 and Destination waterfront [are] prime examples of things we've said we wanted to use the POCAC for.”
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