7/31/08

SEE OUR NEW VIDEO, SAVING PUGET SOUND: A CALL TO ACTION HERE.

People For Puget Sound, along with partners Futurewise, Citizens for a Healthy Bay, and Tahoma Audubon, were successful in getting increased marine shoreline protections for the City of Tacoma.

We appealed to the Growth Hearings Board that the city’s existing ordinance did not comply with the Growth Management Act and earlier this month, the city adopted marine shoreline buffers for all its marine shorelines.

The buffer size is 115 feet for Salmon Beach and other shorelines, except for coastal feeder bluffs such as Tacoma Narrows and Point Defiance Park, which received a 200 foot buffer (!!!), and Point Ruston (which is being capped by toxic cleanup) and the industrial Thea Foss waterways, which due to its currently developed state, received 50-foot buffers. 

That’s 44 more miles of shoreline protected, for a total of 916 miles towards our  goal of 1000 miles of enhanced shorelines protections in Puget Sound.

Reported by Cyrilla Cook, Shorelines Program Manager