Neighbors are split on how the city should manage scenic, historic Blakely Harbor.

Cormorants perched on century-old pilings don’t budge when a nail gun suddenly punctures the rain-soaked quiet along Blakely Harbor’s north beach.

The shorebirds don’t seem to notice the whine of an electric saw as it joins the slow thump of nails inside a cavernous waterfront home taking shape across the harbor.

While the birds hold steady, Burney Hill often cringes at the sights and sounds that tell him change is on the horizon for this south island harbor.

“I come to the harbor because it’s peaceful,” said Hill, who regularly glides his kayak over the harbor’s placid surface. “It’s an intimate connection to a place where wildlife is just rampant… where evergreen sentinels surround you and the hills are so high…and the mist is just gorgeous.

“When nobody’s motoring around and it’s quiet, it’s a rock-solid experience.”

Hill, a Diamond Drive resident, knows he has little say over what happens on the private lands along the harbor. But the shore is a different matter.

“I don’t want to see any more docks,” he said. “I’d also like to see all the docks that are here removed.”

Hill sets himself squarely on a far end of the debate over whether to allow new private docks on one of Puget Sound’s least developed harbors.

Crowned by a protected estuary at the harbor’s head, Blakely is prized as prime habitat by marine animals and as prime real estate by some home owners.

Spurred by a handful of lawsuits from harbor dwellers, the city is currently reconsidering prohibitions that have prevented the construction of private docks for nearly six years.

The city has presented five options for governing docks, from stripping away local restrictions to a full prohibition.

Current rules, which were passed as an ordinance in 2003, allow for two community-use docks and one public dock. None of which have yet been built.

With only eight docks in the 65-acre harbor, boat traffic has remained relatively low. Eelgrass, a marine plant that teems with juvenile salmon and other aquatic life, has bloomed along long expanses of the harbor’s shores.

New docks, according to Hill and a number of marine scientists, will endanger this ecological vitality.

But shores bustling with human activity are not new to the harbor. Blakely was once host to one of the world’s largest lumber mills and a vast shipyard that turned out fleets of tall-masted vessels.

The beaches were crowded with wood bulkheads, busy plank roads, row houses, pile-mounted saw shops and heaps of lumber.

It’s this history that drew Curt Winston and his wife Carol to Blakely Harbor 12 years ago. They live in a small waterfront home built by the Port Blakely Mill Company in 1879. Their 50-foot dock stops short of old pilings leftover from a ferry landing that ended its cross-sound service in the 1930s.

“This is not a nontraditional use,” said Winston, pointing from his front porch to the dock and pilings. “It’s been this way for years and years.”

The Winstons have collected artifacts from those long-gone industrial days. Their coffee table and window sills are crowded with beach-combed boot heels, square nails, bits of copper sheeting and a key ring that once matched a door at the Port Blakely hotel.

While Winston has no plans to expand his dock, he supports others who want the same harbor access he enjoys.

“It’s unreasonable, the people who say, ‘no new docks’ or who want to rip out the old ones,” he said. “When you buy waterfront you ought to be able to put a boat out if you want.”

Chuck Kuhn, who lives a few houses down from Winston on Seaborn Road, has hoped to tack a modest dock to his north shore property for nearly 20 years.

“It’s to fish, it’s to do wake-boarding with the kids, it’s easier access to maintain boats,” said Kuhn, who is party to a suit contesting the city’s dock prohibition.

“Some people have put out this perception that the people in the suit are developers,” he said. “That’s absurd. I’m an a photographer – an artist – and I’ve lived here for 19 years.”

The current ordinance has proven unworkable and has unfairly halted dock access to the harbor, according to Kuhn.

“It would have worked at one time if the city had moved into action and bought a parcel for a public dock,” he said. “But, at this point, nothing’s left to buy.”

As the remaining waterfront parcels were snapped up, the new neighbors haven’t found a way to establish the “community docks” allowed under the ordinance.

“It’s too hard to get that many people together to put together a deal,” Kuhn said.

Under the legal settlement the city reached with Kuhn and others party to nearly a dozen lawsuits, the city must amend its prohibition to allow some docks in the harbor. Of the five options now under consideration, the litigants favor a plan that would allow harbor residents to build one community-use docks for four or more properties. This alternative, which is outlined in the settlement, would also allow a dock for properties with 400 feet of shoreline.

Rules restricting new docks in Blakely Harbor were initially established in August 2001, followed by an all-island ban a month later. The wider prohibition was scaled back in 2003 to Blakely Harbor exclusively.

The city successfully defended the Blakely moratorium against suits filed in 2003, prevailing in both the state Shoreline Hearings Board and the Thurston County Superior Court.

Claimants also filed nine lawsuits in U.S. District Court seeking monetary damages. These suits assert that the moratorium constituted an illegal “taking” of the claimants’ property and violated civil rights.

“It’s in the title from the mill company,” said Kuhn. “It says we have the right to have a dock.”

But the mill company deeds contain other tenets that wouldn’t stand up in court today, according to 35-year Seaborn resident Rachel Smith.

Her deed contains stipulations banning residents “other than of the Caucasian race” and outlines rules for servant quarters.

“This harbor is here for everybody,” she said in her wood fire-warmed home, sitting under a wall covered in black and white photos of the harbor’s shipyard. “I don’t object to a few more (docks), but I still like to enjoy walks down on the beach. I want it to be unobstructed and I want to look at a natural scene.”

The debate over docks sets Rachel’s husband Bob on end.

“It irritates me, this notion they have a ‘right’ to build docks on the shore,” he said. “They’re being selfish. People with property here imagine that what they own goes to the core of the earth and clear to the zenith and halfway across the harbor. It doesn’t. The harbor belongs to the world.”

The Smiths favor holding firm to the current city ordinance, which Rachel helped craft in 2003.

Stripping away the old docks goes too far, Rachel said.

“It’s OK to have a blemish,” she said. “It mixes the bitter with the sweet. It’s like art. If you have a painting of two pears with an insect on one, that adds to picture. But cover the pears with flies and it looks rotten.”

The Smiths say the ordinance provides a good middle road between those who want water access and those wishing to preserve the harbor’s natural features.

“I think the people that brought suit are despicable neighbors,” said Bob. “And the city caving in to them is absolutely preposterous.”

Altering the ordinance will allow “the camel’s nose into the tent,” he warned.

“People with these million-dollar mega-houses will say, ‘hell yeah, now I can build a dock,’ and that’s how you get a proliferatio,” Bob said. “You get a bunch of obnoxious docks and the obnoxious people that use them.”

Rachel concedes that the ordinance she advocated for should have come with a stronger effort to acquire public land.

“I sympathize with the people that want docks,” she said. “We had our sights on a piece of property that was for sale then. It could have had a dock. But who has $600,000 to spend?”

The Smiths would rather see the city use open space funds to purchase a potential dock site than pay-outs to litigants and a spate of new private docks.

But until then, the Smiths suggest the old adage: ‘Love thy neighbor.’ A befriended neighbor might just share their dock in return, or help establish docks for use by the neighborhood.

“Our neighbor shares their dock with us whenever we need to tie up,” Bob Smith said. “Why do they do it? They’re doing it out of the generosity in their heart and out of friendship.

“That’s how things used to be done here. Anytime something had to be done, we did it as a neighborhood.”

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Harbor choices

The city, as a condition of a legal settlement, is undergoing a public process to determine new rules governing docks on Blakely Harbor. Five options have been presented for public comment.

The options include:

Option A: The city would strip away harbor-specific local restrictions, allowing the regulation of docks to fall on state guidelines.

Option B: Local neighborhood docks could be built if shared by four or more properties, or by properties with 400 total frontage feet. Existing and remnant docks could be expanded.

Option C: Joint-use docks could be built if shared by six or more properties. Expansion of existing and remnant docks is not allowed.

Option D: The “no-action” alternative would keep existing regulations adopted in 2003. The ordinance permits one new public dock and two community docks.

Option E: New docks and expansion of existing and remnant docks would be prohibited.

The City Council will deliberate on harbor dock rules from 6 to 8 p.m. on Dec. 6. A one-hour public hearing will follow.

A final council decision on the amendment is tentatively scheduled for Dec. 13.