DEPOE BAY — After years of neglect, city officials are anxious to sell a once-thriving fish plant that now holds only distant memories.

“Up until the early eighties, the world turned to Depoe Bay for its crab, salmon and other fish,” remarked Brady Weidner, the town’s public works chief who oversees the city-owned port. “The plant dates all the way back to the 40s, processing bottom fish and salmon. Crab got big in the 50s and 60s, then sea urchin and hag fish, or slime eels.”

The city acquired the building, which sits on pilings over the water, in the 1990s, renovating the plant with a USDA grant.

The clutch of buildings at the southwest end of the six-acre harbor — the world’s smallest — once had an outsized influence on the town’s economy with fish processing, boatbuilding, fuel sales and ice for the state’s largest charter fleet. In 2018, the last renter, businessman Geoff Molfino, processed a million pounds of Dungeness crab at the city plant.

But competition from bigger plants in Newport, growing regulations on commercial fishermen, tariffs and tight margins have brought commercial fishing to an end in Depoe Bay, for now. Faced with fixing a deteriorating building, the city council this month ordered the plant to be sold.

“We don’t want to put any more money into it,” said city councilor Bill Masella. “We’ll take what we can get for it, as-is. It could be a lot of things in that marine zone, for example, a restaurant. ”

The council determined to bypass a Realtor and put the property on the market for $450,000. For more information, call Depoe Bay City Hall at 541-765-2361.