Do not give away control of your boathouse and your money. An issue being brought before the membership, at the November general membership meeting, is the setting of Minimum Boathouse Construction Standards. These standards if adopted, will affect every boathouse in the club. In this issue of the chart you will be presented with two options for these standards proposed by the Moorage Ad-hoc Committee and another by the Moorage Committee. After careful review I would not recommend either proposal. There are some serious problems with both proposals.

According to the Minimum Boathouse Construction Standards, as proposed by the Moorage Committee, if you need to modify your existing boathouse, lengthen, widen, or raise the roof, you must bring the entire boathouse up to the new standards. This will mean you may have to provide new flotation, new siding, replace the roof, cant the walls and replace the studs, etc. In short you will need to rebuild the boathouse. I was told by the City of Port Orchard, Planning Department, they and the Department of fisheries would consider this a rebuild and you may not get a permit to rebuild it. Under this proposal if you want to sell your boathouse you must disclose to any buyers the Minimum Boathouse Construction Standards so the buyer will know that he may not be able to modify the boathouse to suit his needs without rebuilding it. This proposal would impact the resell value of your boathouse. How much would you pay for a boathouse you would have to rebuild from the water up in order to make it two feet longer or raise the roof and you may not get a permit to do that work? This proposal would make your boathouse worth nothing.

The Ad-Hoc Committee proposal is a more moderate approach which will allow you to modify an existing boathouse without having to rebuild the entire boathouse. This would allow us to integrate new owners into the club and maintain boathouse values while upgrading the boathouses. The problem I have with this proposal is that it was based on information supplied to the Ad-Hoc Committee by the Moorage Committee and that information was not in compliance with current requirements of the Department of Fisheries or City Building and Planning Department Codes. I talked with these agencies after the Ad-Hoc Committee finished its work.

Since both proposals are not in compliance and in conflict with current building codes I think we need to table this issue and form a new committee to determine if we should or should not have building standards or requirements and if so what they should be. There is no reason to rush into passing building standards at this time. We can take the time to look into this carefully and only when we are sure of what we are doing make an informed decision.

Respectively submitted,

VC Bob Taylor 360-876-0176