Nov-2017

204 205 BREMERTON, WASHINGTON workload of shipbuilding, repair, and maintenance required for the Pacific war effort.Most of the reloca- tion was temporary, though, and only 27,678 citizens were left in the city by 1950.Throughout the next several decades,most of Bremerton’s office and re- tail space remained in the hands of Edward Bremer, son of William Bremer and the sole remaining heir to his wealth. Bremer began to neglect his proper- ties, never increasing decades-old lease rates and failing to make necessarymaintenance upgrades. In 1978, the Bremerton City Council passed an ordi- nance declaring the entire downtown a “blighted area.” In 1985, the Kitsap Mall opened in nearby Sil- verdale, and Sears, J.C. Penney,MontgomeryWard, Nordstrom, Place Two,Woolworth, and Rite Aid all closed their downtown Bremerton stores. Upon the death of Edward Bremer in 1987, the Bremer prop- erties were placed under the complete control of a trust held by Olympic College, the city’s two-year community college, founded in 1946.As of 2010, many buildings still remained vacant due to lack of marketing. Patty Lent was sworn in as Bremerton’s Mayor in 2009, and over the last eight years, the city has experienced revitalization and growth. Its current population is 40,500,with a large percentage of that number being active military and former mil- itary families.“We are a Navy city,which means that we have the second largest employer in the BY THE NUMBERS TOTAL AREA: 32.29 square miles POPULATION:  41, 500 CIVILIAN WORKFORCE: 33, 101 UNEMPLOYMENT: 4.8% 2016 MEDIAN INCOME: $50,166 state of Washington with our Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility,”Lent reports.“We have two aircraft carriers home-ported here and three submarines. There are about 20,000 who work in the shipyard–14,500 are civilians.We’re the only shipyard in the United States with a dry dock large enough to take a carrier out of the water and do the maintenance on it.” Today, Bremerton has several key areas of focus: repurposing its downtown real estate, attracting new business and industry, and promoting the city’s assets to prospective new residents and homeowners.“We have some old buildings that were built in the ’20s,‘30s, and ‘40s, and are in terrific shape,” says Lent. “One example is the Roxy–it was built in 1941, and the person who bought it is refurbishing it. It will be a theater for local art- ists, film festivals, and it’s being brought back exactly like it was.” “We have 3,400 acres of green space at the airport,with only five different property owners,”Lent continues.“So, if someone were to build a manufacturing or light industrial facility, that area is available.We’ve done a lot of the EIS (Environmental Im- PATTY LENT MAYOR