According to your article, this could
be a 20 Billion dollar project, but the $1.50 per Barrel tax proposed last year would generate how much per year?

"The tax would have raised some $100 billion a year for water quality projects to benefit Puget Sound and other water bodies, including the Spokane and Columbia rivers."

As long as Martha Kongsgaard is on the PSP board and particularly as Chair, it is very hard to see it as anymore than a patronage "feel good" organization. Their recent efforts to become the primary clearing house for all recovery funding and ranking of projects is more about expansion of power than preservation.

The management of PSP in general, and of David Dicks in particular, have squandered any credibility the organization may have in its short existence - they need to clean house before they can clean the Puget Sound.

The Puget Sound Partnership - a NEW state agency! - was formed out of a no-longer-ignorable fact that Puget Sound "restoration" had spawned a whole army of fiefdoms, all acting independently for their own preservation and power. These disjointed groups all grasped for their share of federal, state and local taxes. Their primary motivation was self-preservation (salaries). The PSP was supposed to fix that and make recovery spending more efficient. It has not. The problem is that almost every single recovery group (non-profit organizations, indian tribes, federal state and local government offices) leans towards - and supports - our state's Democrat Party. And the PSP bureaucracy is unlikely to cut funding for political allies. So the taxpayers not only have the huge mouth of the PSP to feed, they ALSO still have all the disjointed, competing fiefdoms. The problem with the PSP goes far beyond misappropriation of government funds and crooked contracting. The real problem is the institutionalization of political agenda within state government. The Puget Sound Partnership is NOTHING MORE that a jobs program and PAC for our state's Democrat Party. Their job is to provide "scientific" support for that party's political agenda. Period.

Somebody help me out: what and how is PSP proposing to spend this vast amou t of money? I honestly don't get it.

On the one Mr. R. Talks about land-use as the key issue?

But land use is not a public billion dollar issue but a matter of design and lifestyle.

So what are they thinking?

Conversely, it seems to me that the low-hanging fruit is likely (under many soil conditions) to be retrofitting parking lot surface runoff, as done at Northgate's westerly parking. But such retrofit is relatively inexpensive -- but how much? Per acre? Do they even know? If not, how can anyone be quoting dollars?

I am puzzled about what PSP is doing so very glad to redd your article and tat maybe PSP is also puzzled.

What is the needed land use change?

Ah, BlueLight. Another fringe Republican who feels much better when he drops the "ic" off the end of the Democratic Party's name.

If most of the people and organizations supporting Puget Sound cleanup are affiliated with the Democratic Party, maybe there's good reason -- the Democratic Party has consistently been more supportive of environmental priorities than the Republican Party. The last Republican environmentalist left office in this state several decades ago. BlueLight's snide dismissal of Puget Sound cleanup is indicative of that party's priorities.

Not a party member, R on Beacon Hill. Party politics are part of the problem. You are part of the problem.

My, my. How quickly the debate turns to them (Democrats) versus us (Republicans). Grow up and face the facts, you guys: concerted efforts to get people involved in the protection of Puget Sound have been ongoing for more than two decades. The main culprits-- toxic chemicals, rapid urbanization, pathogens from failing septic systems, etc. -- were identified in the mid-1980s by the Partnership's predecessor, the Puget Sound Water Quality Authority.

I'm sorry that we citizens feel compelled to attack the current entity for its arrogance, killing the messenger as it were. Let's stop bickering along party lines, roll up our sleeves and change our water quality-killing ways now, before another decade of inactivity passes.

Speaking of multiple fiefdoms with the best of intentions, People for Puget Sound (PforPS) is another limiting impact by refusing to go beyond partied assumptions.

Even so, those interested in exploring definitive recommendations about land use, need to look behind the doors (links) at the bottom of the page here http://pugetsound.org/programs/policy/issues/stormwater/stormwater-policy

A year's worth of asking for a printable full text document got a minor improvement in presentation and an unresponsive contact. Guys: people handle full, non-selective information very well and politics remains a mess without it.

Thank's for bringing attention to this issue. I think this article fails to make much of a point. Is the reader supposed to takeaway that the PSP is doomed because somebody bought Macs instead of PC's?

I know the contracting issues probably look bad and from those who were trying to do the work, the contracting was weird. What the article fails to touch on is that the PSP was facing impossible deadlines and there was little time for a formal bidding process. That said, they had access to any relevant expert on the West Coast and utilized many of them well.

In the end, I feel like this article was an attempt to be sensationalist. The contracting issues raised in the report were pretty minor considering what the PSP has been trying to do the last couple years. If someone could show me where they used an unqualified contractor, that would be interesting. From what I have seen, the people working on this project had produced an enormous amount of work in a short period of time.

The problem is that fixing the puget sound is a HUGE problem that ultimately comes down to how we build our homes, buildings and roads, etc. This article just doesn't live up to the headline. I hope that doesn't sound too snarky - it is just honest feedback.

In other words, I do not get the impression that the PSP is broken just because they are facing challenges. I don't even understand what the author thinks is broken about the PSP.

Why is the political bent of the agency an issue? Here's one example: researchers at Oregon State University have determined the NUMBER ONE THREAT to PNW salmon and their habitats is increased immigration into the region, the vast majority of which comes from outside the U.S. and Canada (their words, not mine). Rather than voice the fact that we cannot have our cake and eat it too (duh!), the PSP subjugates to the Democratic (is that better, R on Beacon Hill?) Party and their championing of illegal immigrants. So, King County proclaims itself a "sanctuary", the Seattle City Attorney jiggers sentencing guidelines so convicted illegals don't catch the eye of ICE (and face deportation) and the state gives driver's licenses to illegals. So, on the one hand you have a government structure ENCOURAGING immigration to the region and, on the other hand, you have scientific research saying this increased immigration is the NUMBER ONE threat to PNW salmon. And the Puget Sound Partnership's word on the issue... (crickets chirping)... is silence.

Yes Puget Sound should be cleaned up. No one is disputing it. But is a political agency the way to do it?

The issue is that the PSP is mismanaged to the point that illegal contracts were issued, justifications were falsified (urgency, and then contract is twice extended), mandatory specifications were ignored, outrageous hourly rates were paid ($470/hour to K&L; Gates), responsible agencies were bypassed (AG office), money was diverted for no benefit to taxpayers according to Audit ($10,000 to Cascade Conservancy where Ryan Dicks was a lobbyist), and the appearance of rewarding Rep Dicks 4th largest political contributor looms large (K&L; Gates law firm). K&L; Gates also was instrumental in David Dicks getting hired. Many additional detrimental issues have been uncovered that slowly the press is starting to report.

Most galling is that David Dicks in an interview AFTER Gregoire summoned him and reprimanded him, stated that there were no serious audit findings.

As a military officer trained in government contracting such misdeeds would have gotten a less connected manager fired, or worse.

Now I've heard everything. The military standards for government accounting are the pinnacle of excellence? Would those be the same standards used in Iraq?

Tell it to the Marines.

Fundamental concepts missing here.

Good conservation and best management practices are essential for Puget Sound cleanup. There is an urban and a rural component and they must be addressed with different strategies. The urban component would be the industrial and densely populated area pollutants. I see these as the major issue. Large capitol projects will be required here, such as a Metro retrofit, which may or may not even be possible.

The rural area is easier because natural systems are still largely in place, but Mr. Ruckelshaus is going down the wrong road blaming land use patterns. Which land use patterns? All of them?
A read of the action plan lists virtually every land use including clearing, conventional forest practices, dairy farms, construction practices, shorelines and water use. In other words, almost everything done today from Puget Sound to the summit of the Cascades.

I can't think of a better way to scare every property owner to their core and energize a movement resulting in a mega land-use war guaranteed to provide full attorney employment into the next century.

Why not cooperate with and employ landowners in a productive effort that will pay cleanup dividends? In other words enlist their support of a good program.

In my elected capacity as a King Conservation District supervisor, I see conservation dividends achieved as a matter of course using cooperation. Without cooperation of the landowners, good outcomes are not possible. The district writes over 100 farm plans a year, is engaged in a new forestry (in planning stages) program and does riparian restoration and many other types of conservation projects and programs that are all based on non-regulatory cooperation based model.

Another large problem is the science. Best available science has to be agreed on, and it is not. Scientists of all disciples and political persuasions need to hash out the science and then proceed with the most effective strategies with sound cost/benefit analysis.

Good science and a cooperative landowner/agency strategy is the best course in the rural areas. Large capital projects will be needed to address urban area waste and drainage issues.

“researchers at Oregon State University have determined the NUMBER ONE THREAT to PNW salmon and their habitats is increased immigration into the region, the vast majority of which comes from outside the U.S. and Canada (their words, not mine).”
— BlueLight

I did a google search for what you call “their words,” and I found many instances of this same comment of yours on many blogs/articles, but I didn’t find the OSU researchers’ words, so I was unable to find out what they really said or who “they” were.

Simply saying “researchers at … have determined…” by itself doesn’t really raise the report to the level of credibility (despite that phrase being so common in the media). After all, it was reported over and over that researchers at the University of Utah determined how to make cold fusion work.

But the main point I’d like to make is that even if the above paraphrase of OSU researchers were accurate, your interpretation of the import of that statement isn’t very useful. If someone builds a very poorly designed house with multiple structural flaws, it would be easy to get a bunch of physicists to agree that the number one threat to the house is gravity. That doesn’t mean that the solution is to try to build an anti-gravity machine.

Similarly, we and our predecessors in the Puget Sound watershed have created a lot of development that has been poorly designed with regard to our environment and is unsustainable. We can approach this problem 2 ways: we can dramatically reduce the area’s population (just limiting immigration won’t be nearly enough), or we can change our style of development so that it is beneficial to our environment rather than detrimental to it.

Neither is a slam-dunk. Both would be exceedingly difficult. But the latter approach is the only one with a real future, barring cataclysmic population reductions.

To quote, then, stillhope: "Should society control western North America’s rate of human population growth, which is driven almost entirely by immigration from outside the United States and Canada, plus some from elsewhere in the United States and Canada?"

Here is a link for you: http://oregonstate.edu/dept/fw/lackey/Salmon2100.htm

To follow your analogy... "if someone builds a very poorly designed house with multiple structural flaws"... would you hire them for your next project?

The PSP is nothing more than a shill for the Democratic Party.

Land use as such is not the issue. It is the sheer volume of human activity (production, consumption, construction, travel), the continuing rather fast growth of population and production, and essentially how households and firms BEHAVE. So low or high density land use are not necessarily good or bad, rather the output of toxic materials and the capacity of our disposal systems and of nature itself to deal with them. Our knowledge of the nitty-gritty details of the human-environment interface is poor, and where the PSP can help.

BlueLight, Thanks for the link. It was interesting reading and I must say I'm glad to see social scientists working with marine & aquatic scientists to take on these problems in a larger context. I didn't find your exact quote in the on-line papers, but I did find enough similar verbiage to give me an idea of what they are saying. For example,

"Some overall improvement in salmon spawning habitat may be possible if the number of humans in the Pacific Northwest remained static, but habitat improvements will be increasingly more difficult to achieve if the human population increases several-fold by 2100."
—Lackey, Robert T., Denise H. Lach, and Sally L. Duncan. 2006. Wild salmon in western North America: the historical and policy context. In: Salmon 2100: The Future of Wild Pacific Salmon, Robert T. Lackey, Denise H. Lach, and Sally L. Duncan, editors, American Fisheries Society, Bethesda, Maryland, 629 pp.

The following illustrates how the authors see population pressure in the future, essentially an extension of the present:

"Visualize 50 or 100 million people in this region, and their demands for housing, schools, tennis courts, football stadiums, expressways, planes, trains, automobiles, Starbucks, McDonalds, Tim Hortons, WalMarts, electricity, drinking water, pipelines, marinas, computers, DVDs, 12-screen movie theaters, ski resorts, golf courses, weed- free lawns, big city hotels, and university conference centers."
—Lackey, Robert T., Denise H. Lach, and Sally L. Duncan. 2006. Wild salmon in western North America: forecasting the most likely status in 2100. In: Salmon 2100:...

Therein lies part of the problem: if we assume our development style isn't going to change, even though our population were to be static, "some improvement...may be possible" — but clearly that's not an optimistic prognostication. In this scenario we're not doing enough to take responsibility even for our existing environmental impact, let alone that of tens of millions more people. To go back to my analogy, we are, in fact, hiring the same poor designers over and over again.

But I'd take it a step further than that. Those tens of millions more people are going to have an impact somewhere. Whether it's here or somewhere else is irrelevant in the big picture. Preventing immigration to this region on environmental grounds without addressing the real cause of the environmental impact is just kicking the can into someone else's watershed. What we really need to do is to find a way relatively soon to dramatically reduce the environmental impact or our homes, Starbucks, McDonalds, marinas, electricity, golf courses, transportation, etc. Salmon might be our bellwether, but there's a lot more than salmon at stake.

stillhope,
Re: "here or somewhere else is irrelevant in the big picture"

Humans do need to moderate their proliferation, but I agree its more a matter of excess consumption than number of offspring. For instance, the construction industry would not be ruling the roost if we were wiling to call them on embodied energy. Were the contest about longest lasting value, more thought automatically would be given to design because thoughtless mistakes would carry a much higher penalty than they do today.
Existing resilient (readily adaptable) buildings and cityscape would carry the weight necessary to resist being replaced with brittle designs like the ubiquitous packs of multi-storied barracks created by Seattle bureaucrats assuming a housing bubble was forever.

The other little matter is sharing growth. Competitive ultra-urbanization is not necessarily the answer to all that ails us. The author of the new book on Factory Farms notes the problem with feedlots: the land (and health) only handles so much concentrated waste. Spread the animals and the farms out like farmers long ago copied from nature and it's a whole other story. For the human version see Mike Davis' Planet of Slums.

"Sustainable" meaning "worthy of lasting a long time" is a radical thought where obsolescence rules.