On August 12, the Port of Ridgefield's commission meeting ran out of chairs. About 30 extra seats got added for the crowd, and every one filled, with people standing in the hallway outside to hear the public comment period on the waterfront redevelopment plan. Most of what got said that night was opposition.
That scene is worth sitting with, because the easy version of this story is "residents don't want change." That's not quite it. The people organizing against the current plan say they're not against development on the old Pacific Wood Treating site at all. What they're pushing back on is scale, sequencing, and a public process that started to feel, by early summer, like the big decisions had already been made before anyone asked residents what they actually wanted.
What Phase 1 Actually Includes
The Port of Ridgefield has been working toward this moment for close to 30 years. The waterfront property, roughly 40 acres along Lake River, spent decades as an industrial site under Pacific Wood Treating, which at its peak employed around 400 people. Cleanup of contamination on the port and city-owned property finished in 2015, handled under Washington's Model Toxics Control Act with state oversight, not as an EPA Superfund site. That distinction matters because port staff have said publicly that some of the community confusion this year traces back to people assuming this is a federal cleanup site. It isn't.
In November 2024, the Port signed on with Palindrome Communities, a Portland-based developer, to plan the site. The Phase 1 concept that's now on the table includes:
- A 9-acre public park along the river
- A 58-room boutique hotel
- An office building of roughly 25,000 square feet
- A mixed-use building with ground-floor retail and residential units above
- A separate standalone residential building
Port officials have pointed to the $90 million already spent removing contamination and the $17 million Pioneer Street Bridge connecting downtown to the site as evidence of a long-term public investment that's finally paying off. At full build-out, the Port estimates the project supports about 335 permanent jobs and generates roughly $1.3 million a year in combined property tax for the city, county, and port, plus about $320,000 in annual sales tax.
No formal development application has been filed with the city yet. Groundbreaking is targeted for late 2027 or early 2028, according to Port executive director Ethan Perry.
The Number That Kept Climbing
Here's the piece that generic coverage of this story tends to flatten: the opposition didn't peak and fade over the summer. It grew, steadily, alongside every attempt by the Port to slow down and gather more input.
| Date | Event | Petition signatures |
|---|---|---|
| April 21 | Port shows detailed concept at Spring Commission Coffee, Clark County Fairgrounds | — |
| April 23 | Ridgefield City Council meeting, about 20 residents speak against the plan | — |
| May 15 | City Council meeting, public comment runs nearly 50 minutes | — |
| May 17-18 | Roadside protest near Pioneer Street and Royle Road | 1,776 |
| June 27 | Preserve Ridgefield Waterfront calls the plan too dense | growing |
| August 12 | Port Commission meeting, standing-room only | 3,446 |
That's not a petition losing steam. That's a petition that roughly doubled between mid-May and mid-August, even after the Port paused its own timeline specifically to gather more feedback. Perry has confirmed the Port amended its memorandum of understanding with Palindrome this summer to buy more time for community input. The people signing the petition don't seem to read that pause as reassurance. They read it as evidence the original schedule was too aggressive to begin with.
Where the Actual Friction Sits
Once you get past the headline numbers, the specific complaints from residents are narrower and more concrete than "too much development."
Robynne Knight, who organizes alongside Wendy McIntire under the Preserve Ridgefield Waterfront banner, has said her issue isn't the project existing, it's the height. She's told local reporters she'd like to see buildings capped at one or two stories, not the six or seven she believes are planned for parts of the site. McIntire has pointed to something even more literal: the boat launch. By her account, the shared parking area for boaters and fishers currently holds about 35 spots, and nothing in the Port's plan meaningfully expands it, even as the plan adds a hotel, office space, and housing that would all draw more traffic to the same stretch of waterfront.
Then there's the wildlife refuge. The site borders the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, which protects more than 5,000 acres just north and south of the property. Resident Aaron Nelson, who launches his boat from Ridgefield for local fishing, has raised a specific concern about multistory buildings and added lighting pushing waterfowl deeper into the refuge, away from the areas where the community currently watches and hunts them. The Port says it has been coordinating with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on exactly this question as planning continues.
Connor Webb, a 20-year Ridgefield resident who covers local news on YouTube, has raised a different kind of concern, about the process itself rather than the buildings. He's pointed to a June 17 Port meeting where Perry presented the Phase 1 framework as largely settled before public comment even opened that night. Perry, for his part, has said Phase 1's broad framework reflects five years of public input, tracing back to a 2022 port-issued survey. Knight has pushed back on that framing too, saying the 2022 survey used a forced-ranking format that asked residents to rank uses like hotel, residential, and commercial against each other rather than simply asking what scale they'd support.
That disagreement over what the 2022 survey actually showed is, in a lot of ways, the real fault line here. Both sides are pointing to the same document and reading two different mandates out of it.
Who You're Actually Supposed to Call
One piece of practical confusion the city itself addressed directly: this isn't a City Council decision, at least not primarily. In an official statement issued after the April 23 meeting, the city clarified that its role here is mostly about zoning. The waterfront site carries a Waterfront Mixed Use designation, adopted through the city's land use map, and that zoning already allows residential, commercial, recreational, and marine uses. The city's statement was blunt about where residents' energy should go: the Port of Ridgefield owns the property, so the Port is the body that has the most direct say over what actually gets built.
That's a useful thing to know if you're trying to figure out which meeting to attend or which inbox to email. The city council can weigh in, and residents have used every meeting to make sure they do, but the property owner making the calls on scale and phasing is the Port commission, not the council.
What Happens Next
The Port closed a second community survey the week of August 17, part of the pause it announced this summer specifically to gather more input before locking in details. Per a July 3 email from the Port, staff plan to analyze that input and hold a second community meeting to share what they heard and how it shaped the concept going forward.
Beyond that, the timeline is genuinely open. No development application has been submitted to the city. Unit counts for the residential building and the residential floors above the mixed-use building's retail space haven't been finalized. Groundbreaking, if the current late 2027 or early 2028 target holds, is still more than a year out. Whatever the second community meeting produces, expect the same questions to resurface: how tall, how many parking spots at the boat launch, and how close is too close to the refuge.
If you live near downtown or spend weekends at the launch, this is worth following past the headlines. The next real milestone is whatever the Port shares after digesting the August survey, and that's likely to be the clearest signal yet of whether Phase 1 changes shape or stays as drawn.
Joy Johnson pays attention to stories like this one because they shape the character of the neighborhoods she works in every day. If you're curious how development along the Ridgefield waterfront might shape the broader picture of what it's like to live here, or you just want a local perspective when the next chapter of this story breaks, reach out to Joy Johnson directly.
