(web version)

Public Access
by Laurel Kaminski

Slipping on loose landscaping bark, Tess Wolkin follows a buried path down an embankment. At the bottom, she veers right around a pile of blackberry cuttings, then left around a cement-block wall. Across the railroad tracks, she climbs over piled rock to get over another wall and up the hill. After stepping over a low fence, she’s back on the trail again.

Three years ago, an easy-to-follow trail ran down the embankment and up the other side of the railroad tracks and connected Fairhaven to Boulevard Park. Three years of effort by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad and the City of Bellingham have gone into blocking the trail. The obstacles start with signs and a fence and end with the layer of landscaping bark that makes the path slippery and messy.

A new connection between Fairhaven and Boulevard, the Taylor Avenue dock, is slated for completion in June 2004. Until then, unless a person is willing to trespass, getting to Boulevard Park from Fairhaven requires turning away from the bay and walking along the road half a mile to the Boulevard Park parking lot.

The railroad bisection of the South Bay Trail is just one of the barriers to waterfront access in Bellingham. From the southern city limits to the northern edge of the urban growth area, public access to three-fourths of Bellingham’s 11-mile waterfront is cut off by the BNSF’s railway line, industrial development and a landfill. What is left is a disjointed assortment of parks and public trails and the challenge of finding ways to improve public access.
Wolkin is glad the city recognizes the need for convenient access.

“Our waterfront is nice; you want to be able to get to it.” Wolkin said. “Boulevard Park is my favorite because it is kept up and a good place to run.”
Whether it’s Boulevard Park in the winter or Marine Park in the summer, three-year-old Brady Wilson goes to the beach almost every day. Throwing rocks in the water is high on his lists of favorite things, up there with playing baseball and chewing gum. During the summer when days are longer, Brady walks to the grassy Marine Park in Fairhaven with his mom and little sister. In the winter, the family drives to Boulevard Park, where Brady runs around with other kids.

On the former site of the E. K. Wood Mill, Boulevard Park is built on fill like most of Bellingham’s shore, said Jeff Jewell, photo historian for the Whatcom Museum. The park has a lawn, a paved path and benches facing the bay, but a very limited beach. Between the benches and the water, the shore is stabilized by riprap. Because the rocks are jagged and slippery, Brady’s mom won’t let him climb over the boulders to get to the water.

Zuanich Park at the Squalicum Harbor Marina and Tom Glenn Common in front of the Hotel Bellwether are similar to Boulevard. Both have lawns, paths and riprap and are popular for kite flying. Both are located on the outer edges of the harbor, with little pedestrian connection or access to the water.

The short, poorly connected segments of public access do not encourage the public to access the waterfront, said Robyn du Pré, environmental advocate and former BayKeeper.

“People don’t want to get in their cars and drive across town to walk for 20 minutes on the beach,” du Pré said.

A map from Bellingham’s Parks Department shows half a mile of public tidelands south of Marine Park, sandwiched between the bay and the armored wall of the BNSF tracks. The beach is not accessible at high tide.

The high bluffs of weathered sandstone covered with red-barked madrona trees on Clark’s Point make great vantage points for watching the sun sink behind Lummi Island. Despite signs warning against trespassing, groups of colleges students, couples coming to watch the sunset and families from nearby neighborhoods fill the tracks leading to the bluffs on a sunny afternoon.

Railroads on the waterfront shaped Bellingham’s development. Extractive industries, including coal mining, fishing and logging brought in multiple railroads, which worked in tandem with shipping to move the raw material and goods, Jewell said. The city and community groups have turned some of these rail lines into public trails. Others, such as the Burlington Northern Santa Fe line, are still in use and form a barrier between Bellingham and the bay.

“One of our biggest barriers has been trying to work around the railroads,” said John Blethen, a former volunteer for Greenway trail linkage projects around the bay. “Their interests and the interests of the community are not the same.”

BNSF is interested in safe crossings, Blethen said. In the case of the unsafe south bay trail crossing used by Wolkin, they responded with a cement block wall.

“They contend that they are federally mandated and that they don’t need permission to do what they want,” Blethen said.

Once completed, the Taylor Avenue dock will connect the south bay trail with Boulevard Park via a bridge over the tracks and a boardwalk along the beach. While it will not access the beach, the walkway will give unobstructed views of the bay and the Lummi Peninsula.

People looking for direct access to the water follow Roeder Avenue past Squalicum Harbor until the road ends at the Mt. Baker Plywood entrance. There, past the entrance to the mill’s parking lot, a gravel lot leads to the beach.

Little Squalicum beach runs nearly a mile to the north. Past that point, public lands are patch-worked with private property that extends down to the mean low tide line.

Du Pré has tried unsuccessfully to learn where access on this beach is legal, but others haven’t bothered. Life-long Bellingham resident Mike Danielson has been walking this beach since he was a boy hunting rabbits near the Nooksack delta.

“I don’t worry about it,” Danielson said about the distinction of private versus public beach.

Not all property owners are bothered, either.

Set on the bluff above the beach, Steve Satushek’s house looks out to the bay over the top of a thick knot of trees and underbrush at the edge of the beach.

“Beach ownership has enhanced my connection to the bay, made it more intimate,” Satushek said. “With the woods, there is room for public access and private property together.”

Satushek said he doesn’t mind when people walk along the loop trail he made through the trees at the base of the bluff he lives on.

“My property line goes all the way out to low tide,” Satushek said. “In the summer time, that’s way out there. I don’t know why I should own all this.”

The biggest barrier to the beaches is not that they are private, but that people can’t find access, said Chad Umland, a land manager with the Department of Natural Resources.

“Even where tidelands may be public, it is likely that there is no upland access, because most of that land is owned privately,” Umland said.

Before Cliffside Condominiums, the cement plant and Mt. Baker Plywood, when street car lines ran to street ends, owners of bay property allowed public access, Jewell said.

Streets that end at the bay are now marked with white “no beach access” signs below their dead end signs.

Locust Avenue off Marine Drive is a dead end without a “no beach access” sign. Cars can park in the three to four spaces alongside the road. A path off the right side of the dead end twists down the bluff to a public beach, marked at its north end by the graffiti-covered private beach sign of the Cliffside community.

While the patchwork design of public beaches on the bay’s north and south ends may impede access, the biggest barrier for the general public is the industrial development between Boulevard Park and Tom Glenn Common, Jewel said.

During the first 100 years of Bellingham’s development, waterfront access meant access for industry, Jewell said. But waterfront demands have changed during the decades as industry moved away from the waterfront and the public’s interest in the waterfront grew.

Bellingham needs to update its shoreline master plan by the end of 2005, according to the Department of Ecology. As required by the Shoreline Management Act, the master plan must include public access. What that access entitles the public to is up for debate.

The city and Port created the Waterfront Futures Group in 2003 to help assess the needs of the community in developing a new shoreline master plan, said Steve Koch, a member of the Waterfront Futures Group.

“There is (currently) a public beach at Cornwall Avenue and Wharf Street,” said Patricia Decker, director of the Waterfront Futures Group.
The public access at Cornwall and Wharf is a tiny patch of gravel beach with views of the Cornwall landfill, the BNSF railroad and the Bellingham Shipping Terminal.

The Cornwall landfill itself and the tidelands below it take up as much of Bellingham’s shoreline as Boulevard Park and are controlled by the Port. Decker would not comment on what the plans for the Cornwall landfill are.

Georgia-Pacific West, the largest private land owner on the bay, according to the Bellingham Planning Department, will have roughly 90 acres for sale in the next two to five years, said Chip Hilarides, senior environmental engineer at G-P.

Plans for the site stress mixed industrial, retail and residential uses. Decker said she hoped this would form a 24-hour community of people who would live, work and shop in the area, not just come to the area for the workday and desert it at night. That type of development would increase public access to the waterfront.

“I would like, and expect, to see better trail connections and vehicular connections,” Decker said. “I see a fairly good sized ribbon of public access all along the water, with housing developments of three to five stories.”

G-P’s site is built on fill 15 feet above the water, if the area becomes public, it would be another place for the public to view the water, as long as they look down.

Despite the distance this type of access puts between people and the water, Decker claims this is the type of access people want.

“We interact with the water passively,” du Pré said. “We can go look at the water from a mown lawn. Natural shore versus riprap makes a difference in people’s experience, and there are certainly impacts to their perception of the bay.”

Du Pré said she would rather have better kayak access in the south bay, but understands the need for development that will ultimately draw more people.

“I am a little sad about the way that Bellingham is going,” du Pré said. “I am not in love with my access to the waterfront being boutiques.”