Summit wraps up vast plan to restore salmon
Diverse group of interests is set to deliver ideas to U.S.
TACOMA -- Poised to unveil sweeping plans to rebuild Puget Sound salmon runs, representatives of builders, environmentalists, timber companies, tribes, farmers and local governments are girding this week for an onslaught of challenges.
Five years after headlines heralded Endangered Species Act protections for the Sound's struggling chinook salmon, the people of the region are about to tell federal authorities how they plan to bring the fish populations back to healthy levels.
But what looms ahead is daunting to many attending this week's regional "salmon summit" here: tight government budgets. Public apathy. Private property-rights crusaders and simmering resentment over salmon-protecting building regulations. Efforts to undercut the Endangered Species Act in Congress.
Still, the 500 or so people at the two-day meeting concluding today at the Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center expressed optimism because of the unusual way the salmon restoration plans have been developed -- by locals, rather than by federal officials.
Part pep rally, part seminar, part debate, the summit amounts to a giant strategy session -- held under banners that proclaim: "Creating a future for both salmon and people."
"We have tried from the beginning to see the recovery plan as our business, all of our business," conference organizer William Ruckelshaus, the first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, told the group in the keynote address. "We are asking you to leave your agendas at the door and go to work over the next two days to save people and fish."
Speaker after speaker emphasized the unusual nature of the region's "bottom-up" response to the federal government's designation of Puget Sound chinook as "threatened."
Across 14 watersheds in the Sound and the San Juan Islands, groups of people representing widely varied interests have spent the last three years hammering out plans to resurrect the salmon runs.
Drafts of those plans are being revised now and are expected to be presented to the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service in June.
Ruckelshaus and others emphasized that by taking on the task themselves, people here will come to think of the plans as theirs and will be more willing to pay money or endure land-use restrictions.
"We're in charge -- all of us who share the Puget Sound ecosystem," Ruckelshaus said.
Continue reading this story from the Seattle P-I:
Summit wraps up vast plan to restore salmon
