Washougal's New Park Opened This Spring. Its Most Famous Restaurant Got One More Year.

The city just finished a multi-year, publicly funded park in the middle of downtown. A few blocks away, at the marina, the restaurant that has fed this town since 2002 spent last August fighting the Port of Camas-Washougal just to keep its dock for one more year. Both things are true right now, inside the same three-quarter-mile stretch of Washougal.

That contrast is worth sitting with, because it says something about how this town is actually changing that a list of new coffee shops won't tell you. The physical bones of downtown just got locked in for a generation. Who occupies the storefronts and the docks along the way is a much shorter conversation.

What actually opened this spring

The Washougal Towncenter Revitalization project reached substantial completion this spring, and it is the biggest thing to hit downtown in years. The project built the city's first off-leash dog park, a splash pad, a pocket park, and expanded public parking, all clustered near the Washougal Community Center and the site of the new library branch. It was named Vancouver Business Journal's Top Project of the Year, one of more than two dozen Southwest Washington developments honored at the publication's annual awards.

"We've been working hard to create a place where people want to spend time, whether they live here, work here, or are just visiting," Mayor David Stuebe said when the award came through.

The timeline matters here. The idea for a downtown park dates back to a 2019 city parks recommendation, and the site itself only became available once the library district picked the adjacent lot for its new branch in 2020. Full-scale construction ran from early 2025 into this spring, funded in part through the 2023 state capital budget. So if the splash pad looks brand new when you walk past it this month, that's because it is. Nothing about this park has had time to feel broken in yet.

The restaurant whose lease just came due

The Puffin Cafe has been floating on the Columbia River at the Port of Camas-Washougal's marina since 2002, serving Caribbean-style food from a dock that seats up to 28 people and is reachable by boat or by car. It is the only floating restaurant on this stretch of the river, which is part of why it shows up on so many "don't miss this" lists for the area.

Last August, that dock nearly became a lot less certain. The Guetter family's lease, which had run since September 2019 with a string of one-year renewal options, was set to expire. At an August 6, 2025 port workshop, Business Development Director Derek Jaeger laid out new terms that would more than double the Puffin Cafe's monthly rent over six months in an effort to bring the restaurant's rate in line with the market. The number behind that push is worth knowing: Jaeger noted the restaurant occupies space equivalent to roughly five 35-foot boat slips, which would collectively rent for $904 a month if leased to boaters instead. That figure was the benchmark the port was reaching for, not an arbitrary hike.

Port Commissioner John Spencer was candid about what the Puffin Cafe represented to the port beyond its own lease.

"I think you guys can be the perfect test case for us."

That's the detail that changes how you read this. The Puffin Cafe wasn't a one-off dispute. It was the port working out, in public, how it plans to renegotiate every tenant agreement on that waterfront going forward.

The deal that resulted was a one-year term at the higher rent, not the multi-year security the Guetters had asked for. Do the math on a one-year term signed last summer and you land right around now. Whatever comes next for that lease isn't public yet, but the timing means the question is live again this month, not next year.

Robert Guetter, one of the restaurant's owners, put it plainly during the workshop: "I think we've proven over the years that we're not going anywhere." That's the kind of thing you say when you've been open through more than two decades of Washougal's ups and downs and you're still negotiating for the ground under your own dining room a year at a time.

Main Street changed hands, too

While the waterfront was working through its lease drama, Main Street quietly turned over a few of its storefronts. Compass Coffee took over the old Washougal Coffee Roasters space at 1700 Main St, Suite 130, right where Main Street picks up if you're coming in from Washougal River Road. The shop is owned by Rahim Abbasi, who is also an engineer, designer, and real estate developer behind Abbasi Design Works, and who already runs a Compass Coffee location in downtown Vancouver. The Washougal shop carries the same menu and design sensibility as that Vancouver location, so regulars from either side of the river will recognize the drinks and the light fixtures.

A block up, Trap Door Brewing at 1834 Main St is pouring pints and serving pizza, and Takumi-Ko Japanese cuisine has settled in at 1926 Main Street with a sushi combo platter big enough to feed two or three people. All three sit within easy walking distance of each other, which is a different Main Street than the one that existed even two years ago.

What's actually on the calendar

The Washougal Community Market wrapped its second season on July 31 at Reflection Plaza, 1703 Main St. It ran Fridays from 2 to 6 p.m. for nine weeks this year, up from a shorter pilot run the year before, under Community Engagement Manager Rose Jewell. If you missed it this summer, that's the shape it will likely take again next year: local vendors, live music, and featured authors filling the plaza once a week.

The Washougal Arts and Music Festival happened at Reflection Plaza on August 1, in partnership with the Washougal Songcraft Festival. This year's festival poster featured local artist Sharon Agnor's fused-glass depiction of Steigerwald Lake, tied to a Campanile sculpture the Washougal Arts and Culture Alliance has commissioned for downtown, a public art piece that will eventually be a permanent fixture near where the festival is held.

If you missed both of those, there's still Movies in the Park coming up on August 22 and August 29, hosted by the city of Washougal, according to the Camas-Washougal Chamber's events calendar.

The pattern underneath it

Put the pieces next to each other and a shape emerges. The city just spent years and state capital dollars locking in permanent public space, a dog park, a splash pad, expanded parking, the kind of infrastructure that doesn't move once it's poured. At the same time, the businesses that give downtown its character, the floating restaurant, the coffee shop, the brewery, are operating on much shorter horizons. One-year leases. Market-rate resets. A port commissioner openly calling one tenant a test case for how every other tenant will be treated.

That's not a warning sign. New operators keep showing up anyway. Compass Coffee expanded into Washougal on purpose. Takumi-Ko and Trap Door Brewing opened knowing exactly what kind of lease terms exist on that stretch of Main Street. People are betting on foot traffic here even while individual leases stay short. But it does mean the businesses you love this August aren't guaranteed to be the businesses you love next August, even as the park bench you're sitting on to watch the splash pad almost certainly will be.

If you've been paying attention to what's opening and what's up for renewal on your own street, you already understand something about how this neighborhood is trending that a market report alone won't show you. That's exactly the kind of read Jacob Sanchez works through with homeowners across Clark County every week. If you're curious what any of this downtown momentum is doing to what your own home is worth, get your instant home valuation and find out where your street actually stands.