Port Oks Move Into New Offices On Pier 69

The Port of Seattle is moving, the Seattle Port Commission decided yesterday.

The port will leave Pier 66, its home since 1914, and move to Pier 69, where the port will build new offices in the shell of an old cannery.

The move will boost port office space from 115,000 square feet to 160,000 square feet. About 400 of the port's 1,235 employees now work at port headquarters.

Total cost of the Pier 69 project is placed at $33.5 million, but staff members figure the port's actual cost is $26.8 million because the agency will occupy about 75 percent of the building and lease out the rest.

The port's estimates do not include $9.6 million spent to acquire and repair Pier 69, nor the possibility in the future that the port may have to build a new parking garage or lease parking for its employees.

Diana Swain of the PortWatch activist group said the move's true cost is closer to $45.7 million, counting the entire official project cost, $2.3 million to buy a nearby parking lot and other items. She criticized the port for treating the move to Pier 69 as separate from the port's proposed central waterfront project, a complex centered at Pier 66 that assumes removal of port headquarters with an official cost of $90 million. Her group argues that the port would save money by renovating the Pier 66 offices.

Expressing confidence in numbers presented by staff members, the commission voted unanimously to approve the relocation, begin the selection process for a general contractor and authorize Chief Executive Officer Zeger van Asch van Wijck to purchase furnishings and other equipment in advance and to award the construction contract. The port will now apply to the city to amend a shorelines master use permit it obtained previously for Pier 69.

No other commission votes are required for the project, Davis said.

The port expects to move to Pier 69 in the second half of 1992, leasing most of the first of three floors to Victoria Clipper, Seafloor Surveys International and possibly Pacific Salmon Co., a fish processor and current tenant of Pier 66 which is negotiating with the port.

Commission President Patricia Davis said the commission has carefully considered the question of moving to Pier 69. The commission decided last May to delay acting on the move in order to get a closer review to the cost, she said.

She said the staff members properly decided what should or should not be included in cost calculations.

For example, PortWatch says $2.3 million spent last June by the port for a parking lot at 2428 Alaskan Way should be attributed to the Pier 69 move. Davis said the purchase was not related to the Pier 69 project, for which there is no immediate need for parking. When the port bought the lot, commissioners were told extra parking may be required by the central waterfront project.

Staff members now park in a garage owned by the port that also houses the Art Institute.

``This arrangement can continue until such time as the central waterfront project parking demand necessitates vacating that space,'' Pier 69 Project Manager Karen Waltz wrote in a memo to van Asch van Wijck. After that, the port would have about 18 months to find ``structured parking elsewhere or to arrange for alternate parking spaces for port staff.''

In comments presented to the commissioners, Swain blasted Commissioner Jack Block, who last week had accused her of not being an expert and of pulling numbers from the sky. She accused Block of seven years of ``insulting, bullying tirades'' toward port critics.

Swain said she was no financial expert, but ``I can read, and add, and subtract. . . . These numbers are all from port documents.''

Block said later he would have no comment on Swain's rebuke.

Others criticized the move, but there was praise as well.

Pat Vukich, president of Local 19 of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, said the move was justified to help the port compete with other ports.

``We don't have nice offices to bring in the foreign trade, so thank you for your endeavors,'' Vukich said.