Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part series exploring the role of the Chuckanut Community Forest Park District and its relationship to the city of Bellingham and the surrounding community. Today’s story focuses on the surrounding community’s response to the continuation of the Chuckanut Community Forest Park District.
Tensions between residents and a local special tax district are mounting in Bellingham, where commissioners of the Chuckanut Community Forest Park District recently voted to renew their levy for 2023, and residents don’t know why.
The park district formed a decade ago to fund part of the city of Bellingham’s purchase of the Chuckanut Community Forest, also known as the Hundred Acre Wood. The group, which had total power over setting new levies and taxes in the five-neighborhood district, finished paying off the $3.2 million loan earlier this year.
“The loan is paid off, and all that’s left now is for them to tie up some housekeeping and some bookkeeping,” said Bill Hasenjaeger, owner of the Bellingham-based outdoors company Trail Boss. “The main thing they need to do is transfer the conservation easement to a permanent home … but that’s not what the district wants.”
The conservation easement, given to the park district in exchange for payment of the loan, prohibits future development in the 82-acre stretch of land. But, if the easement isn’t transferred to a nonprofit before the group dissolves, it disappears entirely.
Hasenjaeger, an ardent supporter of recreation within the Hundred Acre Wood, served as the liaison between the city of Bellingham’s Parks Advisory Board and the park district for several years before things “went off the rails,” he said.
“I attended about three straight years of their meetings, but the last few Zoom meetings I’ve looked at, I can’t even watch them anymore,” he said. “It’s just a bunch of people in a room together shouting their outrage about how they don’t like what the city is doing.”
Earlier this year, the city of Bellingham approved a park master plan for the forest, prioritizing both conservation and recreation within the bounds of the park. In September, city staff formally asked the district to disband, launching a one-year timer for the group to transfer the conservation easement and stop taxing residents.
Instead, they announced a new, albeit smaller, levy during their late November meeting, with plans to disband during their September 2023 session.
Beginning Jan. 1, residents in the South, Fairhaven, Edgemoor, Happy Valley and South Hill neighborhoods will be responsible for a 2.25 cent tax per $1,000 valuation on their property.
“We’re reluctant to extend the levy because it is precedent-setting,” said John McLaughlin, one of five commissioners of the park district board. “I worry greatly about it.”
McLaughlin, who initially planned to vote for no levy in 2023, said the group still has more work to do to protect the park from development, which will require funding. Much of the tax funds will go toward a “legal defense fund” for the park, which will transfer with the easement and go towards conservation projects in the forest.
Residents, though, say the park district has overstepped its initial mission.
“It’s kind of like our backyard,” district resident Brandon Watts said. “But our understanding was the park district was supposed to dissolve after they collected tax money from us.”
Watts and his wife Irena Lambrou take their 8-month-old child and their dog into the park for recreation every week.
Park neighbors across the district expressed similar frustrations.
“The [park district] is acting out of integrity with what they said they would do, and that’s a really tricky issue for me,” district resident Annie Molsberry said. “I’m paying for this process and I’m paying for the commissioners to do what they said they would do when we elected them.”
Molsberry visits the park “probably five or six times a week,” she said and expected the park district to disband once the loan was paid off.
“That’s what I voted for. That’s what I said my tax dollars can be used for, but now it sounds like their interest is more in private management of the woods as a nature preserve,” she said. “Whether or not I’m in support of that … this is not what they said they’d do with our money.”
Even though McLaughlin said he shares the frustrations of other residents in the tax district and initially planned to vote no for a levy this year, the park district needs to do more to protect the land from development and other threats, including possible harm from recreators, he said. And that takes money. The group said they tried to meet with the city to rework the conservation easement, initially set in 2013.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “the city was not willing to meet our needs in clarifying the easement.”
Employees at the city of Bellingham maintain the terms of the easement were established a decade ago, and that all the park district can do now is transfer it to another conservation group for future protection.
