“Bainbridge Island made its best pitch Thursday for transferring the Wyckoff property into public ownership.And judging from Sen. Patty Murray’s comments, that pitch was a strike.It is a beautiful location, and clearly important to Bainbridge Island, she told local officials and citizens after a presentation at city hall Thursday afternoon.There are legal issues to work on, but I’m delighted to help in any way I can. You have my commitment to work with you.The problem, most parties agreed, is prying loose the property on the south shore of Eagle Harbor from a court-supervised trust.Under terms of the trust, the property must be sold at fair-market value, and the proceeds used to reimburse the Environmental Protection Agency for cleaning up the site, contaminated by years of creosoting operations.Murray, Washington’s senior senator, was on the island at the invitation of Rep. Jay Inslee, (D-Bainbridge Island), who has been an enthusiastic supporter of turning the 55-acre site into a park.We ride the same airplane back from Washington, she said, and Jay spends the last hour of each trip talking to me about this.Murray heard from Mayor Dwight Sutton, members of the Wyckoff Acquisition Task Force and other community representatives, who extolled the value of the entire site for park purposes.This is one of the finest park sites in the Puget Sound region, said Dave Shorett of the Bainbridge Island park board and a member of the acquisition group. There are 4,000 feet of walkable beach. The park district can maintain it, but we need help with capital requirements.Suquamish tribal representative Rod Purser was equally supportive.Our people used to call that site the home of the eagles, he said. We see it in the future as a meeting place for Native Americans, and we think a park is the best option to protect the habitat.The presentation focused specifically on the western portion of the property, adjacent to the Taylor Avenue road end. The road end is the proposed site of a memorial to the World War II internment of the island’s Japanese Americans, who were evacuated at the old Eagledale dock.Linking the two objectives under the banner of a restoration of nature, a recognition of human dignity, Sutton said the park could be a place to absorb some serious lessons about our lack of foresight.Island goalsSutton told Murray, who is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, that the community wants help in three arenas. The first would be money in the 2002 federal budget for a National Park Service study of the site, for possible inclusion in the park system. The second is for an appropriation to buy out whatever financial interest EPA may claim in the property, making it possible to transfer the site into public ownership. And the third is to give the city or another local agency the first right of refusal to buy the property.There is also a timing issue. Cleanup work on the eastern portion of the property, including the point in Eagle Harbor on which the actual creosoting work was done, will continue for as long as 15 years.But the western 20-plus acres, including the portion adjoining Taylor Avenue, is essentially clean now, meaning the trustee could segregate that parcel and release it for sale.Attendees urged speed, but not haste.We need to make sure there is no disposition of any land until the planning is finished, Inslee said. But Bainbridge Island City Council member Merrill Robison urged that the western portion be released before the remainder of the cleanup is done, particularly so the internment memorial can proceed.Gerald Nakata, an islander who was interned during the war, seconded that.I hope I’m around to see the end of this, he said. It looks like we have a pretty good start.A key will be bureaucratic flexibility on the part of EPA, Inslee said. Because EPA is the sole monetary beneficiary of the trust with respect to the Wyckoff property – the Suquamish and Muckelshoot tribes may share in the proceeds from the sale of Wyckoff assets elsewhere – Inslee said the value of environmental enhancement undertaken by Bainbridge should act as a credit towards the Wyckoff purchase. If the community does things that advance EPA’s mission, we should get some credit for it, even if we do it at a different site, he said.Other avenuesOther options Inslee sees for acquisition are appropriations from a federal fund to purchase recreational lands, a direct appropriation, or a congressional directive that EPA not recover its cleanup costs.That’s a difficult way to go, though, because everybody else will want to do that for their site, he said.While Inslee supports National Park Service involvement, he does not think NPS will be a productive source of funds.The park service is stretched so thin on maintaining its existing assets that it’s very reluctant to look at buying new property, he said.Murray said the degree of enthusiasm and commitment she saw displayed bodes well for the effort.What most impresses me is the level of support, she said. “