Puget Sound Partnership must refine possible actions
October 24th, 2008 by cdunaganI think the pressure is beginning to be felt at all levels of the Puget Sound Partnership — and this is not meant to be a criticism in any way.
Staff of the organization, its Leadership Council, its Science Panel and its large Ecosystem Coordination Board have all been charged with figuring out what is wrong with Puget Sound, and they were given less than a year to work out a strategy for correcting the problems.
While it’s true that much is known about Puget Sound, the problems have been compartmentalized over many decades. You’ve got the Department of Ecology doing one thing, the Department of Fish and Wildlife doing another, local health departments doing something else, and the list goes on and on.
The Puget Sound Partnership has been tasked with breaking open those compartments, tearing down the walls and sorting through everything that falls out.
That’s how we are now confronted with a list of more than 125 possible actions that point the way to restoring Puget Sound to health. I have to say that the process looked a bit disjointed on Wednesday, when the Leadership Council struggled to get their bearings with a massive amount of information. See the story I wrote for Thursday’s Kitsap Sun. If you’d like, you can download the List of Initiatives (PDF 261 kb) that caused the members to struggle a bit.
I ducked out of the second day of the meeting to write the story about the missing Puget Sound orcas and to track down some other stories that you will read about in coming days.
But, following the second-day meeting, I had a good conversation with David Dicks, the Partnership’s executive director. From that, I wrote a short piece, which went up on the Kitsap Sun’s Web site on Thursday and is scheduled to appear in the paper tomorrow.
One of the outcomes of the second-day meeting is that the first draft of the Action Agenda, to be released in less than two weeks, will be a staff recommendation, not a Leadership Council recommendation. It will undergo more refinement and discussion before it will become the recommendation of the Partnership as a whole.
Since the 125+ possible action items represent most of what is wrong with Puget Sound, the ones that don’t become top-priority for the first two years could fit into the text of the Action Agenda, David Dicks told me. About 25 or so could be destined for top-level action, essentially those things that will produce the most bang for the buck.
Criteria for the top-level actions were decided by the Leadership Council, although the current draft (PDF 44 kb) shown here may not be final
The other ideas for change won’t go away; they’ll just be put into priority for work over the coming years.
David Dicks said he has a pretty good notion what 10 of the top action items might be. One he mentioned was “mitigation reform,” with the idea of creating some kind of mitigation banking to compensate for wetland and other types of habitat destruction.
Personally, I have confidence that something good will come out of this process, because I know how much everyone involved in the effort cares about Puget Sound. But success could depend on money and whether anyone can develop a convincing strategy for tackling difficult problems during times of economic struggle.
As often pointed out by David Dicks and state Rep. Phil Rockefeller, the prime architect of the Partnership structure, the Action Agenda will be an evolving document, just as the restoration of Puget Sound must undergo adaptation as we discover new ways of protecting the environment.
Tags: Puget Sound Partnership
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