President Obama is being praised for his decision to pull together all the ocean-related challenges this nation faces and for plotting a unified course of action.

On Friday, the president issued a memorandum calling for a task force to develop a national ocean policy along with a “framework” for action and a set of objectives. See the Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies, along with a news story by reporter Doug Palmer of Reuters.

I was tempted to state cynically that actions speak louder than words, so we should curb our enthusiasm about what can be done to save the oceans. But then I talked to Bill Ruckelshaus, who co-chairs the Joint Ocean Commission, a national group dedicated to this topic.

Ruckelshaus seems to be thrilled with this latest development, following years of failed promises from the Bush administration.

“This is quite a significant event, really,” Bill told me. “It moves the oceans up on the presidential agenda, which means they will get more attention from Congress and from agencies in the administration. Presidencies are all about setting agendas, and this means more attention will be paid to the recommendations we made.”

I’ll tell you a little more about what my conversation with Mr. Ruckelshaus, but first I’ll review the history.

Five years ago, similar praise was accorded to President Bush after the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy — a presidentially appointed body — released it’s comprehensive examination of the major problems facing the oceans. The report included a list of potential solutions.

Adm. James D. Watkins, a retired Navy officer who chaired the commission, expressed enthusiasm for the reception he felt the report was getting from the Bush administration.

“President Bush’s response to the Commission’s Report and his signing of Executive Order establishing a Secretarial-level Committee on Ocean Policy … sets into motion the important process of developing and implementing a new national ocean policy,” Watkins declared.

Despite the positive reaction, I don’t believe a whole lot came about. (Review the last three “report cards.”) A separate report written by the Pew Oceans Commission received even less attention.

After the two commissions dissolved, some members — including Ruckelshaus — moved into a new organization called the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, a nongovernmental group that maintained pressure for action through annual “report cards” relating the progress, or lack thereof, on ocean issues.

In April of this year, the joint commission issued an urgent new report called “Changing Oceans, Changing World: Ocean Priorities for the Obama Administration and Congress” (PDF 280 kb). I outlined that report in a Water Ways entry on April 7.

And so now we come to today, five months into the new administration, which seems to be trying to do everything at once. Can there really be much energy left for a discussion about the oceans?

Bill Ruckelshaus is undaunted. “I think holding back and doing things one at a time just doesn’t work,” he said. “You have to act while the energy is there.”

Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Nixon, now chairs the Leadership Council of the Puget Sound Partnership, where he is heading the effort to reverse the degradation of our inland waterways.

President Bush created the U.S. Commission on Oceans, which probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But pulling all the environmental agencies together and getting Congress to focus on budgets, regulations and international treaties just never came to pass.

Why is Obama’s action different?

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State and local officials are waiting anxiously to learn who will get the federal stimulus money passing through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The money will be targeted for habitat improvement.

I can’t find the national numbers, but I recall that NOAA had requests for maybe 10 times the money it had available. That means there are going to be a few disappointed people and groups around the country.

Some people expected to hear an announcement of the results several weeks ago, but the Obama administration appears to be making a list and checking it twice — maybe trying to figure out which groups are naughty and nice.

Anyway, the Puget Sound Leadership Council moved ahead to award some state funds to make sure critical projects get under way this summer one way or another.

The Nisqually estuary restoration has been named a priority and will receive a good share of the money, but Hood Canal also remains a priority, with projects moving from the drawing board to construction on the water. Two Hood Canal estuary-restoration projects, totaling $2.7 million, are among five Puget Sound projects approved for state funding this week.

The Hood Canal projects are a $1.7 million restoration in the Skokomish River estuary and a $1 million restoration in the Little Quilcene estuary. The other three projects, totaling $1.6 million, are associated with the Nisqually River restoration project.

Check out the press release from the Puget Sound Partnership. Here’s the brief story I prepared for Saturday’s Kitsap Sun:
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Gov. Chris Gregoire today submitted 52 projects, totaling $101 million, for federal stimulus money to come through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for habitat improvement.

NOAA has a total of $170 million to be disbursed nationwide through a competitive process under the American Recovery and Economic Development Act.

“The need for this funding is especially great in Washington state, which is why I have endorsed a large number of grant proposals,” Gregoire said in a press release. “Each of these proposals would create and retain jobs immediately — especially in hard-pressed rural areas — and would provide long-term economic and environmental benefits to the State of Washington.”

Gregoire praised the efforts of the state Recreation and Conservation Office in coordinating the proposals, which were reviewed by the Department of Natural Resources, Governor’s Salmon Recovery Office and Puget Sound Partnership. The projects meet federal stimulus requirements while advancing state plans for habitat and salmon protections.

For a quick list look at projects in the Puget Sound region, continue reading below. For more details with projects in other areas, download the summary table (PDF 63 kb), which includes descriptions and costs.

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Few issues separate people into two groups as much as shoreline management regulations.

We are guaranteed to have a lively debate in Kitsap County and in jurisdictions throughout the Puget Sound region beginning later this year and possibly continuing for the next three years. See my story on this issue in Sunday’s Kitsap Sun.

A preview of this debate was provided in the comments attached to that story. Here’s a condensed version:

familien1
None of this will matter when a KC employee can give a variance from the 100′ buffer down to 10′… and change the 20′ road rule down to 6′ from the road…both variances done for the same property.

beachkid61
If the county or state wants to tell us what we can and can’t do with our waterfront property, then why don’t they pay part of our property taxes which are already inflated.

just_me_nor
yep…Government intrusion into our lives and property has already become suffocating. the next 4 years will be epidemic. it is so sad that the democrats have a stranglehold on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

casey
Too bad the shorelines here are largely private, rather than public, as in Oregon. Puget Sound could be lovely — instead it is a disappointing cesspool. In many places you can’t even see it for the homes and fences that block views, including the views of those who formerly could see it from their homes.

darincroft
Let’s not kid ourselves. There is no such thing as private property and hasn’t been since at least 1971. The government, and especially the ‘Garridoites’ and their ilk that think it all belongs to them and their band of land grabbers.

Regulating shoreline uses is a hot topic because the property is at the pinnacle of value, both in terms of land costs and in terms of ecosystem processes. Many land owners think they can protect the environmental values of their property without governmental interference, and they get tired of the regulations getting more and more restrictive over time. On the other hand, the decline of the Puget Sound ecosystem has created an urgency to protect intact or even damaged shoreline ecosystems.

As David Dicks, executive director of the Puget Sound Partnership, said today on KUOW’s Weekday, the solution to cleaning up Puget Sound relies on some combination of regulations (cheaper for the government) and purchase/restoration (which costs the government more but can be more acceptable in some ways).

In that same broadcast, Bill Ruckelshaus, chairman of the Partnership’s Leadership Council, talked about how it can be easier during an economic downtown to purchase lands important to the ecosystem. But it’s also a time when government budgets for such thing are the tightest.

Ruckelshaus also spelled out his philosophy in a straightforward way:

“Ecosystems are not indivisible from human habitation and there are a lot of humans that live in Puget Sound, and there’s going to be a million and a half more by approximately 2020… We can’t treat the other living things as though they are separate from us humans.

“If we don’t act wisely and intelligently in the way we develop and the way we live, then these … other species we share this ecosystem with can’t survive. What we need to do is put into place systems and processes that allow us humans to prosper — that’s our charge under the statute — and at the same time allow the ecosystem itself to be healthy.”

The KUOW broadcast, by the way, includes some new information about using the federal economic stimulus money for environmental restoration — such as moving up removal of the Elwha dams to 2010. Under the current schedule, the federal money won’t be available until 2012. I’ll be covering this issue in more detail later.

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Happy New Year!

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting many entries lately. I’ve been on vacation since the beginning of the snow — officially since the beginning of last week. I will return to full speed on Monday.

Meanwhile, I’ve been watching developments on the environmental front and will try to catch up on some of the bigger issues when I get back. I’d like to discuss, for example, some of President-elect Obama’s staff positions related to water and the environment.

For now, I’d like to call your attention to a disturbing Washington Post story about Chesapeake Bay, then I’d like to talk about implications for the restoration of Puget Sound.

The Post piece begins:

Government administrators in charge of an almost $6 billion cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay tried to conceal for years that their effort was failing — even issuing reports overstating their progress — to preserve the flow of federal and state money to the project, former officials say.

The cleanup, which had its 25th anniversary this month, seems doomed to miss its second official deadline for achieving major reductions in pollution by 2010.

The story, by David A. Fahrenthold, goes on to say that the Chesapeake Bay Program failed to achieve the political will to reduce pollution. So how did officials in the Environmental Protection Agency and other organizations respond? They fudged the data to show greater progress than what was actually taking place.

Officials did not have good monitoring data to measure progress. So they used computer models to show what should be taking place. Richard Batiuk, the EPAs’ current associate director for science for Chesapeake Bay, said exaggeration was never intentional. Officials simply did not use the models correctly.

When scientists finally caught up with the truth across the sprawling Chesapeake Bay watershed, which covers parts of five states, the price tag for cleanup was $28 billion. Officials realized they had no real plan to meet such a financial and public relations challenge. At the same time, it became clear that the goal of cleaning up the bay by 2010 could not be met — but nobody wanted to be the one to say so.

Ann Pesiri Swanson, executive director for the Chesapeake Bay Commission, said she suspected as early as 1997 that public statements were too optimistic. The situation became more clear as time went on.

“I think that, by 2005, 2006, you know, we should have made more . . . perhaps [we] could have recognized it more publicly,” she was quoted as saying.

In 2004, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that computer modeling and a lack of real-world data “downplays the deteriorated condition of the bay” and paints too-rosy of a picture.

That’s when I began paying closer attention to Chesapeake Bay and comparing it to efforts taking place in Puget Sound. See my stories from Sept. 17 and Sept. 18, 2006. We’ve all learned a great deal more over the past two years.

So what are the lessons to be learned from Chesapeake Bay?

I believe there are many. Above all, the people of Puget Sound must understand where things stand and what is at stake. We must rely on scientific conclusions based on real-world monitoring. Politics must not get ahead of the science — which is to say that most, if not all, actions should be analyzed for their costs and benefits to the ecosystem.

Bob Benze of Silverdale recently wrote a piece for the Seattle Times bemoaning the lack of science brought to bear on the recently adopted Puget Sound Action Agenda. He points out that legislative deadlines forced remedies to be proposed before scientific teams could validate those efforts.

Much of what Bob says is very legitimate, but one could argue that scientists have a general idea about what needs to be done. So taking actions before completing a full scientific evaluation may not be a waste of money. It may be a way to keep Puget Sound from slipping further behind while scientists catch up. Above all else, scientists need data to work with. Much monitoring has been done, but more is needed.

I think Bill Ruckelshaus, chairman of the Leadership Council of the Puget Sound Partnership, has a good grasp of the situation. He has talked about the vital need to measure and report progress. This is one of the big lessons from Chesapeake.

Here are some other lessons I’ve learned: Let the scientists do their jobs; be willing to pay for monitoring; be thoughtful about how progress is measured; be honest with all appraisals; and let the public know the truth, no matter what the repercussions may be.

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Those who attended Puget Sound Partnership’s “celebration” on Monday were treated to a video featuring experts, policy folks and other concerned people describing the values of Puget Sound and its various threats. It included some impressive footage of the waterway and its environs.

This afternoon, the video was posted on the Puget Sound Partnership’s Web site.

Featured are folks including Kari Koski of The Whale Museum, Mike Racine of Washington Scuba Alliance, Mary Ruckelshaus of NOAA Fisheries, Dave Herrera of the Skokomish Tribe, Bill Dewey of Taylor Shellfish Farms, Steve Bauer, a Kitsap County commissioner, and Steve Sakuma, a Skagit Valley farmer.

Some of these people are directly involved in the Partnership process. For example, Sakuma is a member of the Leadership Council; Bauer is a member of the Ecosystem Coordination Board; and Ruckelshaus is a member of the Science Panel.

Monday’s celebration called attention to the release of the Puget Sound Action Agenda, a blueprint for restoring Puget Sound to health.

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Will the economic stimulus package being formulated by President-Elect Barack Obama align with the financial demands of cleaning up Puget Sound?

Several speakers celebrating yesterday’s approval of the Puget Sound Partnership’s Action Agenda said that is exactly where Gov. Chris Gregoire wants to go. See my story in today’s Kitsap Sun.

If that’s true, and Gregoire is able to pull this off, it would be an amazing turnaround. Many of us were thinking that shrinking government revenues would force major cutbacks in state spending — including a retreat in the effort to clean up Puget Sound. Instead, we’re being led to believe that the effort can survive tough economic times.

It’s not clear whether Gregoire will shift funds around to increase, or even continue, existing funding levels for Puget Sound. It’s not evident that she’s even thinking about issuing state bonds to jump-start the effort. And, although the federal government has the ability to print money, we’ll have to see how much fiscal constraint takes place at the federal level and how Puget Sound cleanup fits into the national picture.

Of course, it never hurts to have U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, one of the strongest advocates for Puget Sound, holding a few purse strings in Congress.

Where will the political winds blow? Will the public get behind the Partnership, perceiving local waters as the lifeblood our culture and economic well-being? Or will people be outraged by the notion of spending money to improve water quality and protect plants and animals while people are suffering?

It will be fun to watch the public debate over the next month or two.

One last note about the Action Agenda, something that I’ll need to follow up with further reporting: Why did the Leadership Council retreat from numerical goals, measured by “benchmarks”? I was prepared to put together a list of the “current conditions” along with goals that will bring Puget Sound closer to a healthy condition. The final document deleted most of the numerical goals listed in the draft while expanding the description of current conditions.

I suspect that the simple answer will be that the benchmarks need more work by the Partnership’s Science Panel. But I’ll try to dig into the questions about whether benchmarks can truly represent ecosystem health. In other words, can anyone be comfortable using a few benchmarks to measure restoration progress, given the enormous complexity of the Puget Sound ecosystem?

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On Monday, the Puget Sound Partnership will deliver to the Legislature its Action Agenda for restoring Puget Sound to health.

The draft of the Action Agenda and supporting documents can be found on the Partnership’s Web site.

We can expect the Action Agenda to be an evolving document, with the constant goal of restoring Puget Sound to health by 2020. I think we will see the agenda grow more detailed as time allows the Partnership to delve deeper into various issues while involving regional representatives.

As for the goal of restoring Puget Sound to health by 2020, most people I know believe that this goal is too ambitious, practically impossible. But everybody is fairly nervous about speaking out and telling the emperor he (or she) has no clothes.

In any event, the release of the very first Action Agenda provides an important milestone to be celebrated. The rollout for the media will include comments by U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, U.S. Rep Norm Dicks; Gov. Chris Gregoire; Bill Ruckelshaus, chairman of the Partnership’s Leadership Council; David Dicks, executive director of the Partnership; state Rep. Dave Upthegrove, a chief architect of the legislation creating the Partnership; and Elin Miller, regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Puget Sound Environmental Caucus, a coalition of 43 organizations, offered a letter and comments on the Action Agenda prior to the deadline. If you wish, you can read the two documents for yourself (PDF 100 kb). Priorities for these groups, with detailed suggestions, are stormwater, toxics, habitat, species, water quality and various other issues.

I’ve pulled out a few noteworthy statements from the cover letter:
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Just a quick reminder: If you wish to submit comments regarding the draft of the Puget Sound Action Agenda, they must be in by Thursday.

The Puget Sound Partnership offers plenty of information — including downloads of the entire Action Agenda and a way to offer comments online — at the Action Agenda Center of the PSP Web site.

If anyone would care to summarize your comments in a few sentences and send them to me by e-mail, I’ll try to find a place for them on Watching Our Water Ways. Or you can just post something as a comment to this entry.

Also of interest on the Web page:
Full Size Draft Action Area Profiles (PDF)
New Report on Puget Sound Toxic Pollution (ECY)
2009-2011 Biennial Science Work Plan (PDF)
DNS (PDF)
Final SEPA checklist (PDF)
Q1 supplemental materials (PDF)
Q2.2 supplemental materials (PDF)

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The draft of the Puget Sound Action Agenda is a bit of a jumble in its initial form, but officials with the Puget Sound Partnership say this wide-ranging report will get better with time.

Valerie Wolf braves the rain Thursday near the Norm Dicks Government Center in Bremerton Carolyn J. Yaschur, Kitsap Sun

It is, after all, a broad list of the actions that need to be taken to move Puget Sound toward a healthy condition. What will help in future versions is a list of possible actions in order of priority. I’m told the final draft will also include additional summaries to help people work their way through the dense 50-page report (not including the “action area profiles” at the back).

State Sen. Phil Rockefeller, D-Bainbridge Island, chief architect of the Puget Sound Partnership structure, told me that he’s pleased to have something down on paper for people to review and make comments about. The issue is complex, he said, and people need to understand that those involved with the Partnership are working very hard.

I get the sense that many people, especially conservationists, would like to see a more forceful, perhaps activist, attack on the problem. So far, the Partnership has taken a rational, scientific approach. It seems there is a strong desire among the leaders to bring the public along with education before asking for the levels of funding needed to turn things around more quickly. Economic times are tough, after all.

Can we afford to go slow while putting an optimistic face on the problem, or do we need to scare people into the realization that salmon and orcas are going extinct? That is the key question that the Puget Sound Leadership Council needs to address with some clear certainty.

In writing about this draft, I found it hard to discuss what might be proposed during the first two years without listing all the “near-term actions” (which I didn’t do), because there won’t be enough money to do the dozens of things listed. Those decisions must be made by the Puget Sound Leadership Council, preferably by Dec. 1. In the meantime, I encourage you to take a look at the list in the draft Action Agenda (PDF 1.7 mb).

Also, it’s not always clear who is going to be responsible for what. That is something to be negotiated with state and local agencies, as well as other entities. Such commitments, along with accountability, is the essence of the Puget Sound Partnership structure.

David Dicks, executive director, said what has been missing in previous efforts to restore Puget Sound is an overall scientific-based plan that puts everyone on the same “songsheet.” It’s the same problem plaguing other ecosystems, such as Chesapeake Bay, he said. Plans by the previous Puget Sound Action Team seemed to be no more than a list of what the agencies said they would do, whether or not those things ever got done, Dicks said.

Bill Ruckelshaus, chairman of the Leadership Council, often talks about the need to obtain cooperation from the other “partners.” The Legislature gave the Partnership new techniques of holding people accountable. One would be recommending that funding be withdrawn from entities that aren’t doing the job. Another would be a report card that essentially grades everyone and holds people up for public ridicule if they aren’t getting the job done.

So feel feel free to read my story in today’s Kitsap Sun, and check out reports from other newspapers in the region: Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Olympian.

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