Heed advice to protect historic waterfront

LETTERS

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We hope that Bellingham's waterfront decision makers will heed the opinions of Michael Sullivan in his Whatcom View column of Thursday, Aug. 28. He is right on target regarding both preservation of our history and the opportunities presented by preserving historic waterfront buildings at the Georgia-Pacific Corp. mill site.

If, as Sullivan suggests, Everett is a poor example with its clear-cut approach to development, then Lowell, Massachusetts, (population 105,000) is an excellent example of preserve and reuse development.

We are familiar with Lowell's development because our son is director of planning, community and economic development there. Lowell has converted many of its former mill buildings to residential and commercial use (including a national historic site/museum) and is embarking on conversion of an area of former industrial use to mixed-use development with selected preservation of buildings.

As our son stated, "with the right package of tax credits and a developer who knows how to use them, it can be far more cost-effective to rehab existing buildings than to build new. We've had little trouble doing 2.6 million square feet of adaptive reuse since 2000."

Once history is destroyed, even mistakenly, there is no way to recapture it. Let's not make a mistake in Bellingham.

Cliff and Ruth Baacke

Bellingham

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