Gregoire announces new focus on Puget Sound's health
Citing years of studies and plans that have failed to turn the tide of environmental decline in Puget Sound, Gov. Christine Gregoire is launching what she calls a "bold and aggressive" effort to rescue the region's signature body of water.
Last week Gregoire's lieutenants and others began hammering out a plan to ramp up the rescue. Significantly, the Democratic governor has tapped Republican and two-time U.S. Environmental Protection Agency head William Ruckelshaus of Seattle to spearhead the campaign.
Working with the region's congressional representatives, Gregoire and Ruckelshaus hope to make restoring Puget Sound a top national environmental priority, much as the Everglades, the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay have seen big infusions of federal aid in recent years.
"Puget Sound desperately needs our help," Gregoire said in an interview Friday. "Well-intentioned plans have not brought about the results that everyone hoped they would.
"We have plans that could fill up a bookshelf, and a lot of hard work has gone into that, but the latest report card says that ... we're falling behind in some areas."
Naki Stevens, programs director for the environmental group People for Puget Sound, said Gregoire's push "is hugely significant because it shows the high-level leadership we've lacked."
"It's exciting," Stevens said. "I've been doing this for 20 years, and I've never felt this level of momentum and this sense that people are coming together and saying we can do it."
The signs that Puget Sound's health continues to flag are many: Sewage-treatment plants are overloaded. Thousands of septic tanks are thought to be failing. More than 30,000 acres of shellfish beds are closed by pollution. Every decent rain flushes oil, pet waste, fertilizers and other pollutants into the Sound and the streams that feed it.
Meanwhile, some fish stocks hit hard by overfishing have never recovered. Orcas appear to be having trouble reproducing because of long-lived contaminants in their bodies -- pollutants that remain buried in the sands below thousands of acres in the Sound, with a heavy concentration around Seattle.
And the Sound will face increased pressure from the 1.4 million people expected to move here by 2020, joining 3.8 million current residents.
"It's a pretty stiff challenge," Gregoire said.
Her predecessor, Gary Locke, also launched a save-Puget-Sound campaign, but he did it late in his second term. Days after Gregoire took office in January, her name went out over a press release recounting the disappointing results of the biennial Puget Sound report card.
Despite gains on some fronts, Gregoire was distressed enough by that showing to begin considering some kind of tax increase to expand the rescue effort.
The state is spending some $106 million a year on the Sound. Federal agencies also have been taking on the Sound's problems in recent years, though their spending hasn't yet been toted up, said Brad Ack, director of the state's Puget Sound Action Team, who answers to Gregoire.
Gregoire, Ack and others emphasized that dollars spent aiding the Sound are an investment in the region's economic health because letting the Sound slide into ecological collapse would affect tourism as well as the quality of life that helps attract business here.
Ruckelshaus, fresh from celebrating completion of a $120 million-a-year plan to rescue the region's struggling salmon runs, said those salmon rely on a healthy Sound.
As in the save-the-salmon effort, Ruckelshaus expects to hand power to make decisions about rescuing the Sound to those who will be affected. He'll ask: How would you solve this?
"When you ask people that question, they really go to work on it," he said. "They take it on as their own problem, and then they really make progress."
Continue reading this story from the Seattle P-I:
Gregoire announces new focus on Puget Sound's health
