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In Brief

HARBOUR/1a

Dredging Permit Clears Council on Third Reading

The 9–4 vote ends nineteen months of hearings and allows the channel to be deepened to forty-two feet before the spring freight season.

CIVIC/3b

Streetcar Line to Run Overnight Through August

Transit officials say the pilot adds eleven departures between midnight and five, funded by an unspent federal maintenance grant.

COURTS/7

Judge Orders Release of Pilotage Records

Two decades of harbour pilot logs must be published within sixty days, a ruling the Port Authority says it will not appeal.

WEATHER/12

Fog Advisory Extended to Tuesday Morning

Visibility below a quarter mile is expected along the north shore each night through the middle of the week.

Today: 68°Fog, then sun
Mon: 71°Clearing
Tue: 66°Drizzle
Wed: 73°Fair

The Harbour Report · Investigation

City Quietly Sold Its Last Public Pier, Ledger Finds

Records obtained after a nine-month records fight show the transfer of Pier Nine was approved in a single unrecorded session — and that the buyer had been named in the minutes eleven weeks before the bidding opened.

By Marguerite Okonjo and Daniel Reyes-Hall · Harbour Desk · Photographs by A. Stern

Pier Nine at slack tide — the last municipally owned berth on the north channel, photographed hours before the transfer took legal effect on the second of June.

For eighty-one years the city owned the water beneath Pier Nine, and for eighty-one years it rented that water to anyone with a hull and a hundred dollars. On the second of June, at 4:12 in the morning, it stopped owning it.

The sale closed without a public notice, without a valuation on file, and without the two readings the charter requires for the disposal of tidal land. The Ledger reconstructed the transaction from four hundred pages of minutes, seven calendar entries and a single scanned fax that the Port Authority had marked as a duplicate.

What those documents show is not, on its face, a crime. It is something more ordinary and harder to undo: a decision made correctly in every particular except the ones that mattered to the people who used the pier.

Eleven weeks before bids opened, the name Corran Tidewater Holdings appears in the margin of a subcommittee agenda, beside the words “ready to proceed.” The company was incorporated nine days later.

Statehouse

Budget Deal Trades Ferry Subsidy for Rural Broadband

By Iris Vandenberg · Capitol Bureau

The compromise reached shortly before midnight preserves seventy percent of the ferry appropriation while redirecting the balance to fibre construction in the four northern counties. Both caucuses described the outcome as “survivable.”

Ridership on the two harbour routes has fallen for six consecutive quarters, a decline the transportation department attributes less to fares than to the closure of the eastern terminal ramp.

Business

Cannery Row Landlords Face Reassessment

Property values along the old cannery frontage will be recalculated for the first time since 2011, a change expected to raise the district's tax base by roughly eleven million.

The Night Shift at the Fish Auction Is Vanishing, One Buyer at a Time

Forty years ago, three hundred people stood on the auction floor at two in the morning. Last Tuesday there were nineteen, and four of them were tourists.

By Thomas Aubrey Ling · Photographs by Nadia Rukavina

The bell still rings at 2:00 a.m. It has rung at 2:00 a.m. since the building opened in 1931, and the men who ring it have never once agreed on why it should be that hour rather than any other.

What has changed is who hears it. The floor buyers — the restaurateurs, the market men, the two brothers who supplied every hotel kitchen east of the bridge — have been replaced by a screen in an office park forty miles inland, where the same fish are sold twice before the ice melts.

“You cannot smell a haddock over a fibre-optic cable,” said Ruth Ellery Vance, 71, who has bought here since she was nineteen and who now buys for exactly one customer.

“The auction did not close. It simply stopped being a place, and became a price.”
Ruth Ellery Vance · Floor buyer, since 1974

The auction house has responded the way institutions do: with a viewing gallery, a gift counter and a laminated card explaining the hand signals nobody uses anymore.

Whether that is preservation or taxidermy is the argument now dividing the co-operative's eleven-member board, which meets again in September.

A Century of Harbour Painters, Hung Backwards

By Céline Marchetti

The Meridian Institute's summer show begins in 2026 and walks the visitor backwards to 1911, an inversion the curator calls “an argument, not a gimmick.” It mostly works.

The effect is cumulative: by the final room the water has gone from abstraction to inventory, and the ships have names again.

A Pier Is Not a Parcel

The Ledger Editorial Board

Public land held for a century acquires an obligation that a title search cannot see. The council may have followed the letter of its own procedure; it did not follow the point of it.

We ask for one thing before the September session: publish the valuation, and let the ninety-four people who tied up at Pier Nine read it.

Owner	Class	Berths
Corran Tidewater	Private	6
Port Authority	Public	4
Meridian Fish Co-op	Mutual	3
Halvorsen & Sons	Family	2
City of Meridian	Public	0

The Meridian Ledger