Last month, at the Annual Meeting, WPPA honored an impressive list of new WPPA Life Members at Friday morning’s Awards Breakfast. Among the awardees was long-time WPPA General Counsel and author of Knowing the Waters – Frank Chmelik.

December is a month of making lists - holiday present lists, new year’s resolution lists, and the like. In keeping with the theme of making lists, this month’s column is an annual legal checklist of items that your ports should review annually.

On June 24, 2024, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) issued a final rule on how special purpose district governments, including Washington ports, must make their website content and mobile apps readily accessible and usable by individuals with disabilities.

On June 24, 2024, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) issued a final rule on how special purpose district governments, including Washington ports, must make their website content and mobile apps readily accessible and usable by individuals with disabilities.

Knowing the Waters – This month’s column discusses what restrictions ports can put on persons attempting to access port property.

Knowing the Waters – This month’s KTW blog post is going to look at some “best practices” for managing a contentious public meeting. We covered this topic in a bit more depth with the help of Commissioner Skip Novakovich of the Port of Kennewick at the recent Commissioner Seminar in Richland.

Knowing the Waters – This month’s KTW blog post is going to take a deeper dive into this issue and discuss specific nuances in the best practices.

This month we will focus on claims and lawsuits where there is no insurance. Our goal here is to give ports a quick course on what happens when an incident occurs, a claim is filed, or a lawsuit is served.

In communities across the State, port districts are working on significant projects that benefit their communities such as expanding broadband service, marina improvements, development of marginal lands into business parks, to name a few.