Urban Waters and Puget Sound Partnership: No matchmaker could have made a better match.
Gov. Chris Gregoire performed the nuptuals Wednesday when she announced that the “partnership” – a new state agency charged with cleaning up Puget Sound – would move into Urban Waters, an applied science institute to be created on the east side of Thea Foss Waterway.
It’s an excellent congruence of purpose.
Urban Waters was conceived several years ago as a laboratory for finding ways to protect Puget Sound from the impact of industries and cities – saving the “waters” from the “urban.”
That impact has been huge and damaging. Pollution has been pouring, washing and falling into the Sound for well over than a century, contaminating sediments, estuaries and sensitive habitats. Shellfish beds have been poisoned. Many species have been endangered, including the spectacular orcas.
Invading foreign species have compounded the damage. For example, sea squirts – apparent stowaways from incoming ships – are spreading and choking the seabed in some areas.
With 3.8 million people now living near the Sound’s 2,500 miles of shoreline, the problems threaten only to get worse, especially with another 1.4 million people expected here by 2020.
That happens to be the year Gregoire has targeted for restoring the health of the Sound. The Puget Sound Partnership – launched by the 2007 Legislature with a $220 million budget for the current biennium – is charged with meeting that extremely ambitious goal.
Urban Waters is an ideal base for such a crash program. The location comes with built-in synergy. The institute will already house environmental scientists from the City of Tacoma’s public works department and researchers from the University of Washington Tacoma.
Like the Puget Sound Partnership, they will focus – in more specialized ways – on pollution in Commencement Bay and other parts of the Sound. Concentrating so much research and expertise under a single roof will create an ideal environment for swapping ideas and sharing findings.
The bay itself makes for a made-to-order test lab.
No other major body of water in the region has been more fouled by pollution. The Foss has been especially plagued. After $100 million cleanup, it is already being recontaminated, apparently from toxin-laden stormwater runoff.
When she called for the Puget Sound Partnership in January, Gregoire summed up the goals for the Sound: “I want families to be able to swim in it, fish in it, and dig shellfish from its beaches.”
Commencement Bay is the perfect headquarters for this effort.
