On the USS Ranger

The blogger over at 5views.com can irk me sometimes. Especially on a day like today when he faults "several liberal groups, some of whom the city council looks to for direction" for scuttling the proposal to bring the USS Ranger to Tacoma.

Dude. I was there. We worked damn hard to try to make it work here. Here's the story as I remember it.

In 2002, I received a call from a board member of the USS Ranger Foundation, expressing the interest of moving the Ranger here. At the time, I was the Marketing Coordinator at the Convention & Visitor Bureau; not a position that would normally attract the attention of the Ranger Foundation but I knew the board member personally.

I felt that the Ranger had strong potential to be located in Tacoma. With permission from my boss, I organized all appointments for the Ranger in that first year in Tacoma and fought hard for the project.

We met with John Ladenburg, Juli Wilkerson at the City (then head of economic development), Don Meyer (at the Foss), Park officials, Port officials, and numerous other groups. We arranged for tours of the incredible ship at Bremerton for Mayor Baarsma and a bunch of other elected officials at the local, state, and national level (I was fortunate enough to go as well and I will attest it was an awesome ship).

After a huge summit meeting with 20+ people around the table in 2003 (I think), it was clear even then that there was only one acceptable location in Tacoma for the ship: the end of the Thea Foss Waterway.

All other locations were deemed too difficult for a myriad of reasons. Parking, being a huge limiting factor. Views, being another. The Navy will not donate a ship like this if a group of citizens is opposed to a ship blocking their view, mostly because they don’t want to have it handed back to them.

But even if all the people whose views would have been impacted were in favor of it, it was still very unlikely to go in Commencement Bay. The only practical place to put it in on the Bay was the end of Ruston Way. And that site had three other major hurdles before you even get to the views: parking, traffic, and a very strong current, which was going to increase the cost of the museum substantially.

So it left the end of the Foss as the only location in Tacoma suitable–no view impediment, no strong current, and close enough to the Dome to allow for a short shuttle from the parking lots there.

From there the Ranger Foundation and the Foss Waterway Development Authority started kicking the idea around, and by that time I was out of the picture and at the Grand.

The FWDA didn't come to a quick decision against the ship. I know from personal accounts that they really liked the idea. But the scope of the project was just too big.

The ship, in practical terms, would mean putting a wall more than 1,000 feet long and at, at its shortest, 60 ft. tall at the end of the waterway. The 37 foot draft of the ship presented huge logistical problems there as well. The only practical way to set it up was to jut it into the middle of the navigable waterway, otherwise the ship was going impede ship traffic at the grain silo.

Of course, everything can be worked out eventually, but the cost of that particular site was hard to get around (the estimate then was the entire project would cost $30 million or more there). And the commissioners (rightly, I think) decided that it was just too big to fit. It was the wrong choice for that location and, as such, was not going to work in Tacoma.

It was not ushered out of town by liberal groups. In the end, it was not even the work of NIMBYs. It just wasn’t going to work. I was in many meetings when a chart of our coastline was laid out and a scale model of the ship was pushed around every conceivable nook and cranny we have. We tried hard. I worked hard to get it here and if it had happened I would be proud to be one of the hundreds that made it possible.

I do recall one of the volunteers for the Ranger Foundation telling me back in 2003 that the reception they got in Tacoma was far greater than anywhere else they’d been looking that time. It was why they spent so long working with us, because people here really wanted to make it work. In no other cities did so many people say, “That sounds like a great idea, tell us more.”

All this is to say that it was not short-sightedness, narrow-mindedness, or crazy liberals that made Tacoma not viable. It was a function of largely geography and sheer scale that made it so difficult that ultimately we couldn't find a suitable spot.