Puget Sound Starts Here campaign poster. Photo by John Ryan. View more photos on Flickr.

Progress Slow In Puget Sound Cleanup

John Ryan
02/17/2010

In Olympia today, legislators are scheduled to consider hiking a tax on toxic substances to help keep polluted stormwater out of Puget Sound. But for the first five years, more than half the revenues would go to reducing the state's budget deficit, not cleaning up Puget Sound.

TRANSCRIPT

Financial and political obstacles have stymied efforts to save Puget Sound ever since the first clean–up agency was created 25 years ago. The state's newest Puget Sound agency is now in its third year. Critics and even the agency's own board members are growing impatient for the Puget Sound Partnership to take action.

Near the mouth of the Nisqually River and the southern end of Puget Sound, a gaggle of geese is grazing on a patch of wetland. The places where freshwater and saltwater meet are called estuaries. Most estuaries in Puget Sound have been replaced by cities and ports and farms. And that's left migratory species like waterfowl and salmon with few places to turn.

So last fall the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge took out a long dike. That let the tides reclaim 700 acres along the river mouth for the first time in more than a century. Refuge manager Jean Takekawa says she could see saltwater bringing the estuary back to life in a matter of days.

Takekawa: "I've seen chum salmon already, adult chum salmon, in the restoration site. Bald eagles are using the site because they're finding food out there, including the fish."

A much bigger restoration project is set to get under way next year. That's when Olympic National Park starts to demolish two major dams on the Elwha River. $54 million in federal stimulus funding is speeding that work along. David Dicks calls it the biggest dam removal project anywhere. He's executive director of the Puget Sound Partnership.

Dicks: "So this is huge. Nisqually, huge. Smith Island, huge. We're really doing well on the restoration side, and I think that's in some cases because that's easier, and you're not asking people to make tough calls."

Fighting the pollution that pours into Puget Sound every day has been more of an uphill battle for at least a quarter century. John Dohrmann was head of government affairs at deputy director of the agency that came before the Puget Sound Partnership. He's retired now. He says restoration projects tend to be very popular.

[Ed.:Transcript has been edited and differs from the broadcast version. John Dohrmann was director of government affairs, not deputy director, of the Puget Sound Action Team. (8/25/10)]

Dohrmann: "Because you can pay the landowners, you can bring in volunteers and do work, and then you can say, look, so many acres have been improved. On the other hand, finding a way to have a local government to rewrite its development regulations, that's much harder. But that's what's necessary in the long term. You can't just clean up after you do it, you have to prevent damaging it in the first place."

Partnership officials say they are focused on both preventing new damage and repairing the old. They point to nearly $300 million spent on habitat protection and restoration in the past two years as signs of progress for Puget Sound. Most of those projects weren't the work of the Partnership. They were the work of other public and private entities. The Partnership has spent most of its first two and a half years planning. The agency has a legal mandate to restore the health of the sound by the year 2020. Martha Kongsgaard is vice–chair of the Partnership's board of directors.

Kongsgaard: "We have 11 years. Things aren't standing still while we're trying to figure these things out. So of course it's frustrating, because you want to have been further down the track than you are."

Partnership staffers say coming up with a defensible plan for saving a complex ecosystem is no small task. The agency's big plan is known as the Action Agenda. It spells out the threats to Puget Sound and the actions needed to reduce them. Kathy Fletcher with the group People for Puget Sound says it's a good plan, but she says time is running out for the sound.

Fletcher: "They've done a good job at trying to figure out what needs to be done. My only critique of that, really, is that most of that had already been done before the Partnership came into existence, and I think they lost a lot of time by not building on what had come before."

The Partnership and its consultants held meetings all around the sound to come up with something that interest groups, citizens and public officials can all live with. Randy Kinley is a member of the Lummi Nation in Bellingham. He works on endangered species issues for the tribe.

Kinley: "Do we have that time to try to get buy in versus doing something that we know, based upon science, it has to be done? And I agree with communication, education, but also there has to be some willingness to take some risk for the best interest of the environment."

Scientists and agencies have been reporting on the poor health of the sound for decades. The Partnership's Action Agenda came out a year ago. But the agency is still at work sorting the threats to Puget Sound into three basic categories: high, medium or low.

Ryan: "Hasn't this been done before?"

Neuman: "We have not had consistent definitions of threats before in Puget Sound."

Martha Neuman is in charge of the Action Agenda at the Puget Sound Partnership.

Neuman: "So everybody, every group, every agency, everybody, has their own interpretation of what's high, medium, low. I don't think anyone would be surprised by this list, but it would be then a consistent list that could be used across the region."

The agency aims to decide by this fall how much it wants to reduce each of those threats. That would be more than three years after the agency was formed. Board members told agency staff last month that speed is of the essence.

The Partnership has worked with local governments to create a public awareness campaign called Puget Sound Starts Here. Its messages are simple, like in a video on the campaign's homepage.

Video: "Puget Sound is dying, and it's because of us. The good news is that we can fix it. But the solution starts with you."

The campaign aims at individual actions. It tells people to scoop their pet poop and not wash their cars in their driveways. Martha Kongsgaard with the Partnership's board says the message makes sense, given how little most people know about what's happening beneath the waves.

Kongsgaard: "It is a really tough nut to crack, to get the people, even the choir, to understand how sick Puget Sound is, let alone get the people who live way upland to understand that they've got something to do with that."

And Kongsgaard says such consumer–level messages are necessary to get support for more systemic approaches to the toxic crud that keeps entering the sound.

Kongsgaard: "Get the people to demand that this happen, you have a better chance of getting this work done."

Kathy Fletcher with People for Puget Sound says it's not wrong to focus on individual actions, but that's not enough.

Fletcher: "If we're serious about saving Puget Sound, we could pick up every speck of dog poop and we'd still have a sick Puget Sound. We've got to tackle the bigger issues as well."

Such basic education might not be necessary. The Puget Sound Regional Council — that's a government planning body — conducted a poll last fall on transportation. It found that protecting the waters of Puget Sound from runoff was the region's number one transportation concern. That trumped even traffic congestion as a public worry.

John Ryan, KUOW News.

© Copyright 2010, KUOW