The Port of Bremerton Commissioners voted July 28 to give Circuit of the Northwest another year to find the money for its motorsports park at the Bremerton National Airport, the sixth extension the private developer has received since the original lease was signed in 2011.
Company owner and COO Joel Cohen told commissioners the facility's design is "nearly complete" and that events would likely be scheduled on weekends once it opens, but he did not name the investors he is courting or say what happens to the lease if August financing talks fall through, according to the same reporting.
That agreement authorized payment of up to $502,300 in public money to the Port of Bremerton to contract for those drawings, money already spent on a facility that, six years later, still exists only as a rendering shown at commission meetings.
That scope expansion is itself worth noting: each extension has coincided with the project growing larger and more expensive, not smaller and more achievable, even as the company has yet to demonstrate it can finance the version it pitched in 2019, let alone the amphitheater-and-hotel version it is now pitching.
The Money Question No direct public funding flows to CNW as a company; the $502,300 KPFD authorized in 2019 went to the Port of Bremerton for engineering work, not to CNW's balance sheet.
Port of Bremerton commissioners extended Circuit of the Northwest's lease another year, the sixth extension since 2011, as the motorsports park still awaits financing.