The Port of Seattle is a government agency overseeing the seaport of Seattle, Washington, United States as well as Seattle–Tacoma International Airport. With a portfolio of properties ranging from parks and waterfront real estate, to one of the largest airports and container terminals on the West Coast, the Port of Seattle is one of the Pacific Northwest's leading economic engines. Its creation was approved by the voters of King County on September 5, 1911, and authorized by the Port District Act. The Port of Seattle is managed by a five-member Port Commission who are elected at large by the voters of King County and serve four-year terms. (Both the size of the commission and the length of the terms have varied over time.) The Commissioners govern the Port, lead all inter-governmental functions, and oversee the Executive Director. History Over the course of more than a century, the Port of Seattle has provided facilities for an expansion of Seattle's shipping trade, later including container shipping and the Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, and helped to generate increasing economic activity in the area. Although the Second World War halted much of the global shipping trade and negatively impacted the economy, Seattle again became a major port after the war. Creation At the time of the creation of the Port of Seattle as an institution. Seattle was already a major port. However, its Central Waterfront was somewhat chaotic, due in part to having eight (and in some places nine) more or less parallel railroad tracks along the ill-maintained wooden planking of Railroad Avenue. Although the 1903-1906 construction of the Great Northern Tunnel through downtown had alleviated some of the chaos because trains that were merely passing through no longer needed to use the waterfront route, it did not change the basic fact that this "avenue" along the Central Waterfront was wide, built over water, difficult to traverse, and separated Downtown from the piers. To further complicate matters, tracks were owned by three separate private corporations, the Great Northern Railway, the Northern Pacific Railroad, and the Pacific Coast Company, which operated the Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad. Furthermore, the railroad companies owned the piers and warehouses where the rails and ships came together, inevitably creating an anti-competitive effect for other businesses wishing to ship through Seattle. As early as 1890, Virgil Bogue had proposed public ownership not only of the Seattle port, but of all ports