David Dicks, Executive Director of the Puget Sound Partnership spoke at a People for Puget Sound forum on Dec. 4th, a few days after the new Puget Sound Partnership Action Plan had been presented to the public.  Aside from my notes below, his talk is also available as a video at the website for People for Puget Sound.

The Process

Dicks talked about how the Puget Sound Partnership came to be.  The Partnership was instigated by the governor, who asked Bill Ruckelshaus to be the Chair of Leadership Board and Dicks to be the Executive Director.  Gregoire appointed Dicks in Aug. 2007.  He was tasked with pulling together an Action Plan for what to do to make Puget Sound healthy by 2020.

Dicks said that they did not know where they were going at the beginning.  They had the 7-person Leadership Board, chaired by Bill Ruckelshaus.  In addition they had another advisory group of stakeholders and implementers and an independent science board. 

The legislature had said they wanted both a healthy Sound and a prosperous area and that vision drove the process.  The Partnership decided to implement a vast process of listening to the people of the Puget Sound region.  They held 35 public meetings.

They started with four big questions and asked them:

1. What is a healthy Puget Sound?  What do we want?  Vision for where we want to be.
2. Where are we now?  What is current state of the Sound?  What are the biggest threats?  Really wanted to call it like it is.
3. What are we going to do about it?
4. How are we going to pay for this?

Results

The two biggest threats to the Sound are more people and climate change, which will have a huge impact on salmon.

The Puget Sound region will have about 35% increase in the number of people by 2020.  Currently we develop 70,000 acres a year, an amount that is unsustainable.  Were that to continue, and the land use and transportation policies remain as they are today, the Sound would be dead by 2020.  

According to the study, 54 million lbs. of toxic chemicals are still going into Puget Sound a year, 150,000 lbs a day.  Of that, 10% from industrial point sources.  As a result of permitting processes, these single point industrial sources are reasonably controlled.

The remaining 90% of the toxic wastes flowing into the Sound comes from runoff, a fact that Dicks said took him a while to get his mind around, it was so staggering.

Earlier this year the Washington State Pollution Control Board ruled that developers need to use LID (low impact development) wherever feasible, particularly in regard to stormwater management.   (We wrote about this issue here and here.) If, as Dicks expects, LID is mandated, developers will have to get engineers, architects, landscape architects trained in the many good techniques for preventing runoff.

The difficult issues have to do with how we retrofit urban areas, particularly Seattle, to diminish the impact of stormwater runoff.

Strategy and Plan

Dicks said that the state will need a multi-tiered strategy.  We will need to figure out what are the really important places to protect and where we can congregate people to have a lesser impact.   They looked for what he called, inter-related twofers, those actions that are both good for the Sound and good for climate change.

The PSP Action Plan recommends that we first protect the intact ecologies, rivers that are working well, estuaries, etc. by limiting change.  It is best to buy land but regulations will also be important.  We will need to do a mapping exercise to determine what is functioning well and then bring a big toolbox to bear on protecting those areas.

There are also two large, meaningful areas where we can do something important – the Nisqually Delta and the Elwha Dam removal, both of which have been slated to receive federal money. 

The next issue is stormwater cleanup.  We can begin with 1) stopping pollution sources, move to 2) restoration projects where we clean up existing pollution.

Accountability

Dicks said that prioritizing and proving that we are spending money on the right things is critical in this economic climate.  He said that the Partnership will need to build and implement a monitoring and accountability system, i.e. report cards to determine if people did what they said they’d do.  We’ll have to try some things out and if they don’t work, admit it and change accordingly.

Cost

He said he doesn’t know if it’s possible to say what the total cost will be.  There are a lot of potential paths here depending on the level of regulation used to implement the policy.  There is less cost if we use a lot of regulation and more cost if not.  The Partnership made  the decision not to put a price tag on it. 

He said that the Partnerhsip will need $600 million in the near-term if the state is going to be serious about the effort.  Dicks wrote an editorial in the PI on Dec. 2nd that lays out the short- and long-term benefits of the project, even in the midst of an economic downturn.