What we need is 'one orca, one vote'

The orca vote evidently doesn’t count for much these days. The Puget Sound Partnership went to Olympia this year hoping for a statute that would enable voters in the 12 counties bordering Puget Sound to create an improvement district that could raise money for restoring the Sound. A Puget Sound improvement district won’t even come up for a vote this year. Some observers think the Partnership has been keeping a notably low profile in Olympia. Meanwhile, the governor’s brave deadline of a restored Sound by 2020 has gotten a year closer.

Partnership executive director David Dicks puts a reasonably positive spin on the first months of 2009. The improvement district may be toast for the time being, but the group didn’t announce its "Action Agenda" until last December, so it couldn’t lay adequate groundwork for this year’s legislative session. With more time, the Partnership can be better prepared when it tries again next year.

Even at this legislative session, all is not yet lost. Dicks still hopes the Washington State Legislature will filter any money that flows to Puget Sound programs or projects through the Partnership’s Action Agenda. Instead of running the money through an array of agency budgets and hoping that all their disparate programs add up to something useful, he talks about inverting the process, so only expenditures that will advance the agenda make it into the agency budgets.

However state money is filtered, it will be in short supply. (The best case may be distributing cuts in ways that do the least damage to long-term goals for Puget Sound.) Not so federal money; the Obama administration will send a lot of stimulus dollars to the state and to federal agencies, which could use some of them on projects that would benefit Puget Sound. Dicks says the Partnership has had three people working almost full-time on stimulus proposals.

The organization has put together "=http://www.psp.wa.gov/downloads/2009_stimulus/PS_Econ_Stim_Projects_2009_2010_updated031109.pdf">a wish list of 270 "shovel ready" habitat restoration and other projects that could soak up a half-billion dollars of stimulus money. Millions could be spent in every major watershed. Big-ticket items include $153 million for fish passage at the Howard Hanson Dam, which currently walls off 46 miles of potential habitat in the Green/Duwamish River, and $51,780,000 for removing dams on the Elwha River. Tens of millions more could go into sewage treatment plants at Shelton and Belfair, and into King County’s Brightwater plant. Other funds could restore salt marshes in the Nisqually Delta, buy and remove a trailer park and a small neighborhood near the Snohomish River, investigate reopening the natural passage between Vashon and Maury islands.

Dicks says that the Fish and Wildlife Service could send enough money to the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge to pay for restoring natural systems in the Nisqually delta. And the National Park Service could get money to put Elwha dam removal back on schedule. The removal process was supposed to start next year, but a shortage of funds has pushed the start date off to 2012. Dicks hopes the stimulus will move it back to 2010. What difference would that couple of years make? He suggests that if you’re an orca who can’t find enough chinook salmon to eat, restoring the Elwha’s chinook run two years earlier could be a big deal.

The glass certainly isn’t all empty. And yet, virtually everyone who has given the matter serious thought agrees that a key to restoring the Sound is creating a dedicated, long-term source of funds.

Not that a district would have gotten itself up and running this year even if the Legislature had been willing to act. If the enabling legislation is passed, a tax or taxes to raise money for Puget Sound will require a vote by the improvement district’s governing body. Creation of the governing body will require a vote by the people who live in the 12 counties. That will require a campaign to convince people they want to be taxed by yet another governmental entity. And that, in turn, will require decisions about how the vote will be structured — and, more fundamentally, what that governmental entity will be.

Right now, there are too many unknowns. Would the voters of any county have the choice of opting out? Inevitably, people in less-populous counties will worry about getting rolled by the right-thinking urban hordes. To overcome such fears, the people who created Metro in the 1950s to handle the sewage that was polluting Lake Washington gave the reluctant burbs a disproportionate say. That worked well enough until 1993, when U.S. District Judge William Dwyer ruled that weighted voting violated the one-man-one-vote rule. Metro has since been absorbed by King County government. Forget weighted voting.

And forget a system in which a reluctant county can simply opt out. Subtracting a few counties from the program would torpedo the whole idea. Dicks envisions a system in which seven counties, including King, would have to vote for the district. If seven or more said yes, any county voting no would have to go along. Counties plus the largest cities would somehow be represented on the governing board — as they are on the board of Sound Transit.