There's nothing new in a plan to save Puget Sound

When it comes to restoring Puget Sound, Ecclesiastes seems appropriate: "What has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." On April 25, Robert McClure reported in the Post-Intelligencer that scientists had just ripped into the Puget Sound Partnership's "discussion draft" on water quality. "For a quarter-century, government agencies have been birthing plans to rescue ecologically ailing Puget Sound," McClure wrote. "They didn't work. And neither will the latest blueprint, a brand-new stab at the task unveiled by a brand-new agency that fails to deal with the biggest source of pollutants entering the Sound, leading scientists charged on Friday."

The Partnership's draft, McClure wrote, "devotes just one tentative paragraph to what scientists advising the agency identified as the best solution: 'low-impact development.' That involves steps such as 'green roofs' that soak up rainwater, 'rain gardens' that intercept water before it flows onto hard surfaces, cisterns, and porous pavement that allows rainwater to soak into the ground. 'It's as disappointing to some of you as it is to us not to see those (concepts) pop up as action items,' said Derek Booth, a stormwater expert with Stillwater Sciences."

Where have we read this before? In November 2006, McClure and Lisa Stiffler reported that 14 scientists had signed a letter criticizing the earlier Partnership's approach to stormwater, and calling, among other things, for the widespread use of low-impact development. According to Stiffler and McClure, the scientists had "expressed 'little hope' for the restoration of the Sound unless the draft recommendations on stormwater [. . .] are strengthened [. . .]. 'All of us signed on to that letter because we do feel strongly that the traditional approaches to stormwater have not been successful in actually protecting stream ecosystems,' said Derek Booth, a geologist with the consulting group Stillwater Sciences."

The scientists who signed the 2006 letter had exchanged e-mails about the 2008 discussion draft before April 25, and the general sense of the group, says Dave Montgomery, University of Washington professor of earth and space sciences, was that they wondered whether or not Puget Sound Partnership had even read the 2006 letter. After Montgomery, who directs the UW's Quaternary Research Center, read the P-I article, he said, "Sounds like we need to send them the same letter again."

The Partnership had already pushed back its ambitious deadline for an "Action Agenda" — the to-do list that will guide Puget Sound restoration efforts and serve as the basis for new regulation and funding — from September to December. Partnership officials had said earlier that the deadline might slip. People who were otherwise willing to give them the benefit of the doubt said that would be a bad idea; among other things, it would leave little time to build support for bills at the legislative session that starts in January. We'll see.

Jim Karr, University of Washington emeritus professor of fisheries, says that the current scientific approach is "very 60s and 70s. It's like the people who are doing all this haven't learned anything in the last 30 or 40 years."

Controlling stormwater may be crucial to any real solution for Puget Sound's many problems, but he suggests it's not the holy grail. "I hope this doesn't come to mean, 'if we can just get the stormwater right, everything will be okay,'" says Karr, who was the last director of the UW's now-defunct Institute for Environmental Studies. The current approach "fails to recognize the relationships" among issues, he explains. "It's as if habitat is separate from biology is separate from water quality."

John Lombard, a signer of the 2006 letter and author of Saving Puget Sound, says he's disappointed that "neither the land use nor the stormwater papers even mentions the economic issues of subsidies for environmental degradation or the ultimate need for a transfer of wealth from urban to rural areas for ecological investments ... The land use paper talks about the need for landowner incentives, but offers no fresh ideas about what they should be."

"I'm growing pessimistic," Lombard says, "that the Partnership has the capacity — either in political courage or in truly appreciating the long-term challenges facing the Sound — to offer fresh, bold ideas for what we should do. The Topic Forums have been, at best, a missed opportunity; at worst (witness the stormwater paper), an early signal that the Partnership doesn't have what it takes."

Has anything really changed? Partnership executive director David Dicks says it has. He suggests that even a scathing criticism of the draft does not equal a scathing criticism of the process. The document was a draft of a draft of a draft, he says, and the process is designed to "create a discussion." Obviously, the attempt has been "wildly successful."

Traditionally, Dicks points out, "we'll go into a room and decide what we want to do," run through a lengthy but meaningless "public involvement" process, then do just what they had decided to do anyway. The Partnership, however, actually expects to modify its plans based on outside comments. There isn't time to do a conventional public involvement show before December, he concedes, but anyway, that's not how the Partnership wants to do business.