SEATTLE – A former Environmental Protection Agency director, Bill Ruckelshaus, will lead Washington state’s high-priced effort to clean up Puget Sound, the glimmering but polluted waterway that is home to endangered killer whales and threatened salmon.
Gov. Chris Gregoire appointed Ruckelshaus to the job Monday, as she gave final approval to a new cleanup agency that hopes to attract attention and money from the federal government.
The moves came as federal officials announced that Puget Sound’s stocks of steelhead were the latest fish species being listed as a threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Gregoire, who enacted a new law creating the cleanup agency on Monday, called Puget Sound “the jewel of the Northwest.”
“Today, it looks beautiful on the surface, but beneath that surface, it is sick and in some places dying,” Gregoire said.
Ruckelshaus, who headed the EPA under presidents Nixon and Reagan, has long been involved in salmon recovery and Puget Sound restoration efforts.
He’ll now be chairman of the Puget Sound Partnership, a new agency that ties together government, business and environmental groups to develop a comprehensive plan for restoring the Sound by 2020.
That task is expected to cost nearly $9 billion. State lawmakers have dedicated more than $225 million over the next two years.
Creating the agency and giving it a large budget were two hurdles to convincing the White House that Washington state is taking Puget Sound cleanup seriously, said U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash.
Having Ruckelshaus on board gives the plan added credibility, particularly with Republicans and federal environmental officials, Dicks said.
“This is a very powerful indication of our state’s desire to have a credible program to restore the entire ecosystem of Puget Sound,” he said.
Nearly 4 million people live and work in Seattle and the other cities along Puget Sound’s 2,500 miles of shoreline. That population is expected to increase by 1 million in the next decade, Ruckelshaus said.
Pollution from industry, along with overfishing, hydroelectric dams and urban runoff, have harmed the Sound’s ecosystem.
Despite progress in recent years, Puget Sound is still in danger from pollution, invasive species and other ills, officials said in a status report in January.
Orcas that make the Sound home for part of the year have been recognized as an endangered species. Several of the Sound’s salmon runs, a crucial food source for the whales, also are protected by the Endangered Species Act.
Ensuring that Puget Sound survives in the future will take involvement from all the sides involved in the new partnership, Ruckelshaus said.
“This is not easy to do,” he said. “We’ve tried it in several gulfs and bays and sounds around the country, and we’ve made some progress. But we’ve not figured out how to do it on a more or less sustainable basis.”
Dicks said he is seeking a significant increase to the estimated $2 million to $3 million for Puget Sound in the last federal budget cycle. Dicks, now in his 16th term, is chairman of a House subcommittee that oversees environmental spending.
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