Palouse Property Owners Talking About Moving On But Most Not Quite Ready To Take To Higher Ground

Moving an entire downtown seems pretty radical, but after seeing damage done by the Palouse River this month, Jim Knott thinks it’s a great notion.

Flood waters left behind 2- to 3-inch layers of silt in buildings downtown, which lies in a ravine well below the rest of the community. Some storefront windows still sport water lines.

“I think they ought to destroy this town and start all over” on higher ground, Knott, 53, said Wednesday.

The downtown property owner broached the idea to the Town Council on Monday as 20 residents discussed options that ranged from wholesale renovation to relocation.

Reaction to Knott’s proposal has been lukewarm. Some say Knott is all wet.

“We’ve got a lot of questions and not a lot of answers,” said Mayor Bruce Baldwin.

Bud Bagott, owner of the Bagott Motors auto dealership on the east end of Main Street, said relocation efforts are usually reserved for Mississippi River towns deluged on a regular basis. Palouse, he said, could just as easily protect itself from flooding by raising its businesses 2 or 3 feet higher.

“To totally displace Main Street, I can’t visualize it,” he said. “I’m sorry. It just seems so far off the wall.”

One thing is clear, said Lloyd Barningham, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency: Moving a town is expensive and difficult.

For areas that are regularly flooded, the federal government will pay 75 percent of the cost of “buying out” an area to help it move to higher ground, Barningham said. State and county governments split the rest of the cost, he said.

Once the buildings are moved, a city can build a park or playfields at the site, “but no structure can be built down there again, forever,” he said.

The high cost guarantees that “the state’s going to look at it real close,” he said. The state already must rebuild dozens of bridges and roads knocked out by this month’s heavy rain and snowmelt.

The flooding was the worst in 60 years for this town of 1,000 residents, creating what may be a turning point in its unsteady economic history.

Palouse City, as it was first called, was a lumber boom town in the 1880s and stood to be one of the biggest towns in the Inland Northwest. Then the Potlatch Lumber Company moved upstream and built its own town in Idaho.

Since then, the town has hung on in large part through its role as a bedroom community for Washington State University, 15 miles to the south. The downtown business community barely stretches for four blocks, with vacant lots and empty storefronts filling much of that.

Floodwaters damaged 40 homes and 20 downtown buildings, some of which are on the National Register of Historic Places. The town instructed owners of four buildings judged structurally unsound to barricade entrances and sidewalks so they pose no danger to pedestrians.

Knott, owner of two of those buildings, was forced to move with his wife and three kids to a Pullman hotel, which he had to leave Wednesday as guests with reservations arrived to attend the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in nearby Moscow, Idaho. Now his family is staying in the unheated storeroom of a friend.

Knott lived for the past five years in the Williamson Building, where he operated an appliance repair and second-hand shop. He also owns the Congress Hotel and Theater, a downtown landmark where temperance agitator Carry Nation once rallied and Gentleman Jim Corbett once taught boxing.

The Congress has not been used since the 1950s, he said, and it has deteriorated to the point where its second floor has collapsed. If only for safety’s sake, Knott said he would like the city to condemn the building and have it razed, as he himself can’t afford to do it.

“It’s really got a neat history,” he said. “I’d really like to save it, but it’s the same as everything else. It needs to be torn down. We need to move up the hill and start all over.”

Annie Pillers, a Town Council member and owner of Precision Printing downtown, said she would prefer to see the town turn its riverfront into a park and retain the downtown mix of residential and business properties - at the current location.

“I think the council and the community should look at all the options that are out there,” she said. “As a business owner, I think it would be nice to see downtown revitalized.”

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: FEMA TO SET UP CENTER IN PALOUSE The Federal Emergency Management Agency is opening a mobile office in the town of Palouse to help flood victims get emergency help. The Disaster Recovery Assistance Center will be open Friday through Sunday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the Grange Hall, E. 210 Bluff St. FEMA spokesman Lloyd Barningham said a portable recovery center in Waitsburg, another hard-hit Eastern Washington town, had 32 people visit, some of whom had not yet registered by phone for help. “Part of our concern is we will have people that haven’t registered for various reasons,” he said. “… Six months from now we don’t want to be pulling out and have people say, ‘Well, FEMA never helped me.”’ The Palouse center will be staffed by representatives from FEMA, the Small Business Administration, state Emergency Management Division and other agencies. Flood victims can also register with FEMA by calling (800) 462-9029. Eric Sorensen

The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Eric Sorensen Staff writer The Associated Press contributed to this report.