By Simone Carter
Metro Parks Tacoma recently announced that it will raise the rates for boat storage at Point Defiance Marina for the first time in 14 years. Renters will see an increase of nearly 125% 
on their bills, split among two installments: One on Oct. 1 and another April 1, 2025.
Metro Parks has argued that, although unfortunate, the change affecting some 290 tenants is necessary and overdue. Carr said he’s considered an “old timer” at the Point Defiance boathouse, where he keeps his 16-foot aluminum fishing boat. The 60-year-old explained that he’s had a vessel there since he was 11. As someone with congestive heart failure, Carr said he’s on Social Security disability. He and many other tenants weren’t happy to learn of the upcoming spike in boat-locker rent.
Carr said he will soon go from being charged $112 to $251 per month, something that he says he can’t afford on a fixed income. “So, there goes my only form of recreation,” he said, “not to mention all the salmon that I catch that’s good for me to eat throughout the year, and crab and shrimp — and, you know, not to mention — fun.”
Four tenants spoke with The News Tribune about the higher rents. They recognized the need for a price hike to keep up with inflation. But more than doubling the rates has struck many boaters with sticker shock.
Metro Parks recognizes that the rent changes could squeeze out certain tenants, including older retirees, said Joe Brady, deputy director of regional parks and attractions. “That breaks the heart. That’s not the intention of what we want to have happen, but it is a reality,” Brady added. “If you cannot afford it at that cost, we can’t ask the general taxpayer to cover that cost for you.”
Brady noted that Metro Parks runs the marina as an enterprise fund. Such funds are “typically used for operations that function as a business and recover at least 100% of its costs,” as noted in Metro Parks’ 2023-24 biennium operating and capital budget. Enterprise funds provide services that are “highly individualized” for folks seeking out a particular recreational activity or experience, Brady said.
Another example includes the Meadow Park Golf Course, where the boat-storage operation hasn’t covered its own cost for quite some time: “And we’ve been eating away and slowly degrading our working capital fund to balance the books at the end of each year,” said Brady.
“We’ve had several kinds of king tide-related flooding events that have happened over the past several years,” he continued. “We had a pretty major malfunction and breakage of our fire-suppression system in the new boathouse. So, all of those things had to come out of our working capital to help fix.” Regardless, Carr said, the rent increases will mean that he’ll remove his boat. He might even have to sell it.
Heated Board Meeting
Roughly a dozen speakers, including Carr, aired their grievances about the boathouse changes during the community-comment portion of an early September board meeting. Petitioners told the board that an increase makes sense, even one that’s 10%. But this, they argued, is far too much all at once.
Brady said that although Metro Parks accepts the “management error” in not having raised locker rates in more than a decade, it intends to do so moving forward to prevent a similar jolt. Metro Parks understands that this is a hard pill to swallow, he added. “But at the same time, as the manager at Metro Parks and making sure that we’re fiscally solvent for the entire community, we can’t get into the argument or the idea that public taxpayers — dollars that they earned and pay property tax for — should subsidize the activity for a private boat owner in a public boat house,” Brady said.
In January, tenants learned that they could no longer use the old boathouse building because it had been deemed structurally unsafe. Moving over to the new boathouse led to that facility becoming full. And the closure of the old structure made its elevator inaccessible. That’s led to lines in the new boathouse as tenants wait to get into the water at first light.
“They want us to pay more for giving us less,” said one tenant, before adding that one of the two remaining elevators is regularly down. Another disgruntled community member said that increasing the cost because of inflation makes sense, “but this is far and above that.”
Simone Carter covers Tacoma city government and education at The News Tribune. Read the full story.
