Index

Trip Report:

Puget Sound Partnership meeting of the Ecosystem Coordination Board

November 21, 2013 – 10:00am – 3:00pm – Edmonds. (By Pete Haase)

Introduction:

The Puget Sound Partnership (PSP) has a full-time staff and also a Leadership Council, an Ecosystem Coordination Board (ECB), and a Science Panel. Memberships and missions can be seen on the PSP website www.psp.wa.gov. I attended this meeting of the ECB on Thursday November 21, 2013 at the Edmonds City Hall. Meetings are open to the public, of which I was the only one – at least when introductions were made. This is my report. Italics are editorial/personal comments from me.

There are about 27 people on the ECB; Ron Wesen, who is one of our Skagit County Commissioners, is a member representing the Whidbey Action Area but was not present. Bill Dewey is a member, representing Small Business, and was also present for just for a very short time. Ginny Broadhurst of the Northwest Straits Commission was not there, and was represented by Caroline Gibson of the Commission staff. There were about 25 people “up at the table” including Marc Daily who is the acting Director of the Puget Sound Partnership and Diana Gale, a member of the Leadership Council. (I believe most of the “official” ECB members were there, or had alternates who rather frequently attend. It seemed like everyone was well familiar with the topics on the agenda.) In addition there were other attendees from the PSP staff and from some other member organizations – perhaps another30 people in all, sitting away from the main table. It was a nice big room. There were microphones and they worked well when the people used them!

The Meeting:

There was some awful traffic in the Seattle area and so the meeting start was delayed to allow for the late arrivals. The group did a good job of rearranging the agenda and playing catch up. There was no human welcome from the host, the City of Edmonds. However, the meeting room has a panoramic view of the Sound and the Olympics and it was a post-card morning. We saw a beautiful body of water, a bit of boat traffic and mostly wooded shorelines and hill sides in the distance. A fine welcome but a strange counter point to the subjects of the day! There was lots of good coffee!

After the normal review of the agenda and then approval of the summary of the previous meeting (which I have never seen made available to others – unlike all the other meeting materials) came election of officers and other official business. Neither the current Chair nor vice-Chair was there yet, so some other guy did a great fill-in and the group just went ahead and re-elected the missing folks for another year. They also agreed on the general schedule of meetings and obligations for the next year. This was followed by a time for various members to give their thanks to a resigning long time member – Sam Anderson – who represented Business interests and was associated with the Master Builders Association. Sam gave a well-spoken set of remarks as well. (I know but a little of the Master Builders Association. I could tell by the nice remarks that many thought Sam had done a pretty good job of representing a major force which is often on the push-back side of environmental issues, regulations, and restrictions.)

Next came a time for Public Comment. It was me. Hard to follow the remarks and style of Sam! The “State of the Sound” report was recently released and, among other things, stated that 68% of the 199 Near Term Actions in the “Action Agenda” were “on track” yet the depiction of the needles of the 21 Indicators of Puget Sound health show almost no improvement toward their targets (and some are regressing.) At the same time, the document press-release conveyed mostly a message of “Keep on Keeping On – we are making good progress” – an odd form of logic which raises a big red flag to guys like me. I had looked at all those 135 “on-track” Near Term Actions in detail and found that only four of them had done anything “on the ground” - all the rest “reviewed, collected, planned, reported, surveyed, created, …” - activities done by nice, smart people wearing street shoes working in warm rooms. I thanked the ECB for their really good work and dedication, reminded them that they have lots of input to what the Indicators and targets are, and that maybe they need to rethink the Indicators and targets and then focus effort and money on Actions that actually do Preserve – Restore – Improve. (I did not get a standing ovation, but there were a number of times during the rest of the meeting when one person or another turned and pointed at me and said something like – “Well, HE said ….” Also, Bill Dewey took the opportunity to remind the group of what a great volunteer I was. I have known Bill quite awhile and have great admiration for his work and dedication. We don’t always come down on the same side of things, and so his remarks were especially appreciated by me.)

The first main agenda item was a 2014 Legislative Agenda. A presentation by the PSP staff. It was advertised as a time to review ranked supplemental budget proposals and review and discuss policy proposal ratings. The intent here is to build a “single” list of prioritized requests to the legislature. This approach was partially used, quite successfully, for the last legislative session. The thing went off the tracks quite quickly. The group did not have the detailed materials and what was being presented on the screen was very hard to see and follow. A couple of members noted that their caucus or constituency would no doubt also have other items for the legislature which they would push for but which might not be on this list. The topic was finally stopped and postponed for later in the day when materials would be made available. (During this bit of time, and also at a few other points later in the meeting, I saw gentle chiding of the staff for one thing or another – this time for not having the detailed materials ready. I have been to quite a few of the PSP meetings and have never seen this before. My sense is that these poor folks on the ECB – who have to go back home and promote and defend this stuff – are growing weary of all the studies and lists and glad tidings. They need to see results to talk about – in which the State of the Sound Report is lacking. And I also wonder how long a new Governor – and more of the public – will tolerate the ongoing huge expenditures with so little to show.)

Next was Communicating the 2013 State of the Sound. A presentation by the PSP staff - It was to be reminders of what is in the document and to engage the ECB members in reaching out to their audiences. Unfortunately the first part was several screen slides taken right out of the State of the Sound document –and they are very cluttered, busy, and hard to understand without quite a bit of explanation. None of them showed much progress or success. The projection on the screen in the room was kind of light and hard to read and the presenters talked quite fast. Eventually there was quite a bit of push back from ECB members and the session devolved into more of a question and answer discussion. Two main points of the discussion were to get more local actions and local progress and local messages into the report and to provide everyone some talking points before the press-releases. I got the feeling that many ECB members felt very unequipped to use the State of the Sound document in outreach efforts.

ECB Subcommittee Reports was next. First was the Funding Subcommittee. After some words about the background and purpose of this group, the message was that it has been in hiatus, but is now soliciting consultants who will be “looking at…” after which the group is “going to …” (There is so much “Looking” and “Gonnas” and not enough “Got Dones” in most of these committee efforts – yet no one ever says to change direction, speed up, or maybe – mercifully – just stop. Frankly, I do not get the impression that anybody works these subcommittee projects very hard!”) Now was the Regulatory Subcommittee reporting on Incentives. This team is concentrating on incentives for preserving (or reverting to) Natural Shorelines and for agriculture to follow good management practices regarding water quality/erosion. Some actual incentives should be in place by March – but no discussion of what those would be. I think there was some talk about the difficulty of getting people to stop bulk heading when their property is at risk. But then somebody said that there is no representation from the Agriculture community on the ECB (I guess Ron Wesen does not count for this) and so the committee has to defer to the Conservation Commission for the agriculture incentives piece. I think it was right at the end of this discussion where someone mentioned that they heard there was a new Federal edict that, for farmers to get federal money for incentives, they would have to comply with strict, big, stream-buffer requirements. And that led into the next agenda topic …

Salmon Recovery Council Regulatory Subcommittee Report. The main message was that this group is assembling a report to show which regulations are counterproductive, along with suggestions for changing some regulations to be more useful. But most of the time was spent on various comments and reports, especially from the EPA representative, about this Buffer Thing. I gleaned four main points – there were probably more: 1. It’s true – new Federal money that is used for anything remotely related to water quality must include buffers (although there was no detail on how big they must be, what science prescribes them, …); 2. It’s a “train wreck” since farmers just won’t enroll in those federal programs with the result that future EPA budgets will get reduced (Use it or lose it); 3. The EPA is taking steps to be sure that allocated monies will be spent (not lost) and they have numerous other projects for it, although they need help from their highest levels to make it work; and 4. This thing comes from the Tribes using their Treaty Rights power and initiative to get this whole Salmon Recovery and Protection process moving a lot faster, fuller, and with conviction than it has to date. This topic would have gone on and on, but Vice-Chair Dave Herrera, who also is a Tribal representative, did what I thought was a masterful job of quickly recapping the basis for the Federal government actions and also stopping the discussion. It also helped that it was getting late and lunch was here! I suspect there will be a lot more to be heard about this topic.

Lunch was half an hour – I went out to move my car. So did others. (There is a lot of parking nearby but all the signs say 3 hr parking and are a bit confusing about when the 3 hrs is in force. Better safe than sorry.) The lunch materials provided for the main players is not at all elaborate or excessive, but healthy, and there is always enough left over for the side-liners, so that is nice because there is not a lot of time for lunch, and a lot of serious discussions happen amongst people who may not have personal contact otherwise. Also, there are no other breaks, so this is a chance to deal with urgent messages, etc.

Next came a report from the Science Panel and I did not take any notes about it. It was very short – trying to make up agenda time.

PSP staff led a discussion about Indicators Evolution with some emphasis on absorbing the input, of several months ago, from the Washington Academy of Sciences. Again, very complex charts were projected somewhat faintly on a screen and I was unable to follow even the gist of the thing. Some members of the ECB reiterated their desire to somehow show what effect local actions are having on the indicators. (I could have told them that answer – it is “almost none” - since the indicators are not budging and there have been tons of local actions crowed about. This presents a real quandary that needs serious resolution I think. For example, the removal of “derelict nets” has cost some money and hauled out lots of them and saved a lot of fish. Everyone thinks it is a great effort. It does not move a single target-indicator even a smidgen.)

More PSP staff led a discussion about Pressure Assessment Update, again with complex, hard to read charts. The process and approach is just about figured out and the actual update work is about to begin. Maybe the next meeting will have some results.

Kate Litle from the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program (PSEMP) gave a report on the Monitoring-Priorities update. 150 gaps between existing and needed monitoring have been identified. Those are being whittled down to 50 with the intent to highlight the top 10. Unlike the earlier presentations, this had few charts, was well described and I think everyone understood it well. (Certainly monitoring is a big need and there are lots of holes and gaps. Hopefully this effort will get the scarce resources working on the top items to monitor.)

I left in order to avoid too much traffic. The last items scheduled were Floodplains by Design, National Estuary Program Evaluation and Partner Updates. I missed them.

General Thoughts: After this meeting, I looked up and read the legislation that describes the makeup and role of the Ecosystem Coordination Board. There are Geographic representatives, Interest group and governmental body representatives (including cities, counties, tribes, ports business, environmental,) Legislative representatives, and Agency representatives. A primary role of members is to communicate, about the doings of the Partnership, back and forth with constituents. I am in the Whidbey Action Area geographic area, with a representative on this body. The representative for small businesses lives in this area. None of the other categories have representatives from around here where I live. I almost never hear anything from any of these people. My information comes from going to meetings like this or looking on the Puget Sound Partnership website. Between the sad lack of progress toward Targets, the enormous amounts of money spent, and the almost total lack of communication, my enthusiasm level is awful low. But it is a lot higher than any of my friends or associates since theirs are all zero.