For decades, the Port of Bellingham has wrestled with the complexity of shipping terminals, waterfront redevelopment and air travel, perhaps overlooking its truer, simpler calling.
They really should be charging admission.
Port of Bellingham commission meetings, if you dig a bit, are a reality show awaiting a streaming platform.
Case in point: Tuesday night, when port commissioners — the three Lost Souls of Waterfronts Past — met to apply their well-worn rubber stamp to a proposal that at first appeared to be an ingenious bit of self-mocking.
Nope.
The port, oft-berated for exhibiting the transparency of a concrete retaining wall as it sinks public money into dubious flights of fancy, approved a plan to spend an additional $100,000 to pay a local PR firm for emergency public-relations spin.
The one-year campaign (be grateful; the proposal was for three) aims to counter the notion that the port routinely wastes public funds. Adopted with the commission’s Trademark Zero Public Discussion efficiency, it also appears intended to combat a crazy perception that the port is something less than window-transparent with the public.
As my friend Dave Barry would say: We are not making any of this up.
This sort of public policy via three-card-Monte sleight of hand (kids: ask your grandparents) is hardly unprecedented. It’s old-school strategic gaslighting. Paying a public-teat-sucking communications firm to befuddle the public by spinning gross incompetence into victim-of-circumstance pity is time-honored.
Also appalling.
Selling this bag of offal to hapless port commissioners was port Executive Director Rob Fix, the managerial genius who this very week, after losing the second (and the last) director of its airport in four weeks, pointed out that Bellingham Intergalactic doesn’t really have much business, anyway — making it the perfect time to flop about with no direction.
“If there is a time to have a dwindling management team, it’s now,” Fix told CDN. “There’s not as much work to be done out there when you’ve lost 40 percent of your business.”
We digress. The point of the bold new PR initiative, Fix wrote in a memo, is to “create more public awareness” of the port’s clearly excellent work! The spin-cycle’s goals:
- “Help the public see a grand vision.”
- “Clarify for them what the Port does, has done, and what it’s going to do and why.”
- “Create a positive community narrative.”
- “Ensure taxpayers understand the value proposition the Port offers.”
- Etc.
Everybody still with us? I am already experiencing visions so grand that I may have to go lie down and nap near the port’s crowning-achievement waterfront dirt bike track.
But to grasp the depth and breadth of smoke-blowing propelling this public fleece job, one really must wallow around in the tone and tenor of the sales pitch made to the poor, besieged, misunderstood, unfairly maligned victims comprising the port commission.
Editor’s note: If you happen to have any available climbing gear at hand as you read this, please affix yourself to a solid object, such is the degree of evident suckage:
“It pains me to see Port of Bellingham take such a reputational beating,” begins the saccharine paean from Conflux Associates LLC, a side venture for local hotelier Peter Frazier. “The problem has been growing for some time, but has reached a critical nadir.”
Hang on tight:
Because of what amounts to mass misunderstanding bordering on public hysteria, “… It is difficult for Port leadership, commissioners, and the staff. It likely makes retention, hiring, job satisfaction and team building more difficult. And it is not deserved.” (Emphasis deliciously mine.)
“I see the dedication to excellence you have employed and the difficult initiatives you have undertaken,” Frazier wrote, oozing empathy. “I am concerned that this reputational deficit will work against the important economic development outcomes this community needs from the Port.”
Conclusion: “The Port of Bellingham’s effectiveness has been undercut for reasons not of your own making.”
Quick reality points: 1) To anyone with the common sense God gave a goat, the Port of Bellingham’s effectiveness has been undercut for reasons entirely and demonstrably of its own making. And 2) if it’s not already copyrighted by Frazier, “Reputational Deficit” really should be the name of the Port’s new PR-spin newsletter.
Tragically, the unfairly maligned body now faces a “reflexive negative reaction to the Port of Bellingham brand,” wrote Frazier, perhaps forgetting the folks in question recently pinned all the port’s future hopes on a Titanic-themed downtown waterfront hotel built on shifting sands of tidal infill, with a splendid view of a massive, shifting heap of rusting scrap metal.
“You have one option to reverse this deficit: It’s the proposal I am bringing to you today,” Frazier opined, adding: “It will not require hiring an expensive, out-of-town PR firm that could be a bad look for the Port.”
Given that a “nuanced discussion about the work of the Port is beyond most voters and taxpayers,” he suggested, spin clearly becomes the only recourse to keep the simpler folks in their lane (my take: serving as uninformed public-funds milk cows).
“What does seem clear to people,” his pitch concludes, “is a belief the Port is not performing well.”
And there you have it. It’s the exact pitch made in 1979 to yours truly and a bunch of hapless classmates stuck in a rural King County high school with inadequate funding, antiquated textbooks, non-engaged teachers and general malaise: You’re only stuck in a crappy school, the sharply dressed motivational speaker said, if you believe it’s crappy.
Your choice! Why fix something that you can pretend is not broken?
Back then, my hand shot up with a question for the Cadillac-driving huckster: “How much are you being paid for this?” At which point I was ushered to the door by the principal, banned from any future positive mental attitude activities — probably launching my career path, now that I think about it.
A couple counties away and a half-century later, we see, smell and taste the same snake-oil swill. Except at least this time, we have an answer about the cost. It’s a hundred grand. Your money. To convince the world that two decades of port incompetence, a structurally flawed governance structure, and an abject lack of accountability exist only — literally — in your imagination.
Dare to dream, people. Your home port is counting on it.
Correction: An earlier version of this column incorrectly included the phrase, “Because of what amounts to mass misunderstanding bordering on public hysteria…” as part of a direct quote from a presentation written by Peter Frazier. They were in fact the the words of the author. The column was edited to reflect this change at 9:25 a.m. Aug. 16, 2024. Cascadia Daily News regrets the error.
Ron Judd's column appears weekly; ronjudd@cascadiadaily.com; @roncjudd.
