Throughout all the changes you have heard of this past year, our CEO and Board remain committed to preserve the core of the original vision of The Reach as we adapt to hard financial and economic realities. After meetings with our many stakeholders and a public workshop to solicit ideas, we are developing a new "campus concept" that allows maximum adaptability to changing business conditions and opportunities. This will strategically target a series of building projects over time that deliver components of The Reach vision as funds become available, starting with existing resources to construct site infrastructure and the first building on campus. Our Board and CEO are meeting weekly to decide the details of that plan. Here is my personal vision of how it will go. In less than two years, the Reach will open the first building at Columbia Park West, housing:

• Exhibits on the natural history of The Hanford Reach National Monument and Columbia River, developed with US Fish and Wildlife using funds in hand
• Modest theater telling the stories of The Hanford Reach National Monument; The Hanford Story, from the Manhattan Project through the Cold War, Environmental Restoration and the future of Hanford; the B-Reactor Story; and the Ice-Age Floods story
• Classroom for K-12 student programs, professional development for their teachers and adult programs

The campus itself will feature a modest amphitheater for outdoor learning experiences, with a symbolic sun motif, marking this both as the physical center of a student-developed solar system model and the symbolic center of a solar system of interpretive tours that will provide access to:

• Monument lands and river corridor
• B-Reactor as part of the new Manhattan Project National Park
• Ice-Age Floods Trail venues and
• Wine and agriculture country

Expect those tours to ramp up even as construction proceeds. As new funds become available, high priorities for further construction will provide space for potential future collections of artifacts, for expanding exhibit space that could accommodate visiting exhibits and for developing a learning center for dry lands ecology and sustainability education.

While economic realities have changed and our plans have adapted, the need for The Hanford Reach Interpretive Center and its programs has not changed. The time to deliver them is now.              

Fred Raab, RPFD President