BAINBRIDGE ISLAND – A city proposal to add a handful of new liveaboard mooring spaces in the city’s open water marina in Eagle Harbor has officials with Bainbridge Island Rowing worried about the future of their club.

The added boats would sit in part of the rowing circuit the club’s shells have glided through for years, according to club leaders. A series of private buoys on the southern edge of the marina prevent safe navigation in that area, and asking rowers to navigate through the expanded field of boats is a nonstarter, they said.

According to the city, 11 boats have assigned residential spots in the northern areas of the Dave Ullin Open Water Marina, a designated space for boats to anchor in the middle of Eagle Harbor. Under a pair of proposals considered by the Bainbridge City Council on Tuesday, the city would build additional liveaboard spots and fill up the majority of the space throughout the marina by constructing 16 single-point mooring spaces for residential boats.

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“We need safe navigation channels to row,” said Sue Entress, president of BIR’s board, to council members Tuesday. “We don’t have them if you build out this open water marina the way you’ve described. Without safe navigation, we’re going to shut down our programs. I will not put kids or adults out on that water and tell them to navigate through swinging fields of buoys. It’s not safe, it’s not reasonable.”

Entress said the club would have to look at cutting back its programs without the safe rowing space. The club currently has about 100 students and 60 adults registered to row and is in the midst of a $3 million fundraising campaign to finish building a rowing center in Waterfront Park, she noted.

“We’re not gonna just throw up our hands, sell our equipment and walk away because we’ve been left without a navigation channel,” she said, saying that the club could consider an appeal to the state's Department of Natural Resources, which leases the aquatic lands for the marina to the city.

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The council came within a vote of approving one option that would have placed 16 single-point mooring buoys throughout the marina Tuesday. That proposal would have designated space for 10 60-foot vessels, two 50-foot vessels, three 40-foot vessels and one 30-foot vessel.

A vote for that proposal failed with a 3-3 tie, with Councilman Matthew Tirman absent from the meeting. Council members Rasham Nassar, Ron Peltier and Sarah Blossom voted in favor of the proposal while Joe Deets, Kol Medina and Leslie Schneider voted against.

Another option the council considered would have pushed the 16 buoys farther north. That option would have left a fairway for rowers on the southern edge of the marina but would have done so by shrinking the size of boats that liveaboards would be allowed to anchor in the marina. Club officials said that option would only work if transient vessels didn’t anchor in the fairway area.

The city has been considering an expansion of liveaboard spaces in the marina as a way to provide some additional affordable housing on the island.

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“Liveaboard housing is the least expensive way to be housed on our island and also has the smallest ecological footprint,” the city’s Affordable Housing Task Force wrote in a memo to the council last year, recommending the expansion. “We have done the difficult work of negotiating an agreement with the DNR that ‘fits’ our island and creates marine space for those who choose to live on their boats. This is truly affordable housing – island style.”

Adding to the pressure is a deadline to select a final layout by the end of this month if the city is to construct the new buoys this year. The designs would have to be approved by DNR ahead of construction during the summer fish window.

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City staff said Tuesday they had done some initial work looking into whether the private buoys along the southern edge of the marina could be moved and said some of them were potentially unpermitted or in the wrong location. Council members ultimately directed staff to bring back more information about the private buoys to their Feb. 26 meeting, their last council meeting before the deadline to make a decision if construction is to happen in 2019.

“Some of those (buoys), we think there are some opportunities, the ones that are either abandoned or are maybe not in their correct place,” said City Manager Morgan Smith. “Others will be very dependent on the reaction of the owner and if they have a correct permit and they’re correctly located, the idea that they might move is a lengthy exercise, if at all.”