Port of Woodland buys and is operating an upscale RV park along Columbia River

Frequent park visitors celebrated the move, which ensures it will stay an RV park for at least 10 years because of the bonds.

“It’s nice that somebody bought it that’s going to have a long-term view of the area and the development that they’re putting in,” Kris Tucker said while playing with his dogs.

The retiree from Oregon and his wife have come for years to fish and relax along the river and have no plans to stop. They reserved their current riverfront spot more than a year ago; the best spaces at the park go fast.

That demand — driven by the beachfront location, pool and other amenities — might have made the purchase attractive, but it’s just one small part of the port’s broader economic-development vision.

“There are 75 ports in the state of Washington, and they’re getting into more and more different business lines,” Wray-Keene said. “The only thing that ports are mandated not to do is housing, so we have a lot of leeway of where we can go within development.”

Wray-Keene has been in her role for a decade. When she joined the port, it was just starting feasibility studies on the Rose Way Industrial Park, a project that opened in June. And, after years of being the only port of Cowlitz County’s three — Kalama and Longview are the others — without a deepwater access point for ships to dock, plans are now in the works for two. That’s in addition to a slew of other projects.

Cowlitz County cranking

Wray-Keene said growth in Woodland has really taken off in the past five years.

While the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, which is one of the best sources of national economic data, doesn’t have data for Woodland, the data for Cowlitz County shows population growth of a little less than 5 percent between 2017 and 2022, during which its gross domestic product grew a little more than 40 percent. (GDP is the market value of all the goods and services produced by labor and property in an area. It’s a standard measure of an area’s economic output.)

Although those numbers mirror Washington’s, the county’s population growth was twice as fast as the U.S. rate, and the GDP growth was nearly a third larger.

That local growth is reflected in a different type of economic data, too. While only about half as many Woodland residents have a college degree compared with the rate for the U.S. at large, the city’s median household income is actually higher, possibly reflecting the presence of trade and industrial jobs in the city.

To Wray-Keene, that’s exactly the point. She said she hopes local jobs will allow “our kids (to) be able to have trade jobs, to be able to work closer to their families so they’re not having to move hundreds of miles away to get employment.”

Ted Sprague is president of the Cowlitz Economic Development Council, a private nonprofit that advocates and facilitates economic development in the county.

He’s had that job for two dozen years and said that during that time, he’s seen the vision Wray-Keene describes come to fill the gap left by the collapse of the timber industry.

“In my tenure, we’ve had over $2 billion of capital investment, over 2,500 new jobs,” he said. “The numbers are pretty staggering, but we never really do stop and pause and look back on all of it.”

Sprague attributes that growth in both industry and tourism to several factors.

On the industry side, Cowlitz County is caught between the ever-expanding markets of Portland and Seattle but still much less expensive: A 10-acre plot of commercial real estate that would sell for $20 million in those cities costs less than half that here, he said.

And the county has the resources to capitalize on the demand that brings.

“We’re served by two rail lines; we’ve got (Interstate) 5 running through; we’ve got three ports — two deep water; we’ve got the Mint Farm (Industrial Park) in Longview,” Sprague said. “And then we’ve got a really strong workforce that’s used to working 24/7 with kind of the ‘mill mentality’ that people have grown up on here.”

On the tourism side, he said, Portlanders have increasingly been making their way north. He suspects this was accelerated by shutdowns that came early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In the past, there was kind of a curtain south of Woodland, even south of Ridgefield, that if it was anywhere north of Vancouver, it didn’t really exist to Portlanders,” Sprague said.

Do-or-die development

But to some people in Woodland, these changes — which Wray-Keene describes as a tsunami — have not been positive.

“You’re seeing a lot of the old-timers — the people that remember the community as the single stoplight and the old restaurants in town — they remember that fondly, and that’s a beautiful memory,” she said, “but it’s becoming a memory, and at times, there can be some hostility towards that as the growth happens.”

(The port recently encountered pushback from a Woodland city councilor over the development of a former firehouse in downtown Woodland, in part over differing visions of development.)

Wray-Keene said she can respect that anger — “everybody desires that safe town that they grew up in, that they want their family to grow up in” — but she sees development as do-or-die for the town.

“We’ve seen it throughout the country: If you do not plan for that next chapter, you will lose your population, you will lose the jobs, you will lose the industry, you will lose everything,” she said, “and then you lose yourself.”

Back at the Columbia Riverfront RV Park, economic development is the last thing on Tucker’s mind as his dogs frolic, and he watches someone in a boat reeling in a fish.

His plans for the afternoon?

“We’re just going to probably ride some electric bikes and take the dogs for a walk,” he said, “and go to the casino tonight.”