Muddy Waters

At Laurie Brauneis’s cabin I met her friend Washington State Representative Pat Lantz (D-Gig Harbor and Bramerton), to whom she and other shoreline residents had turned for help in 2004. Lantz described Taylor as “wonderful” but pointed out that every geoduck outfit isn’t Taylor. “When I looked into geoducks I discovered the pathetic state of regulation; there is none,” she said. When she brought the issue to her colleagues she was received like Typhoid Mary. “State government had heebie-jeebies about getting crosswise with clean-water, property, and money interests,” she said. “It was lose-lose. They ran from me.” When Lantz went to the DNR, she said, she was “stonewalled.” Finally, she found an ally in Jay Manning, director of the state Department of Ecology. She wrote a regulatory bill but it was promptly shouted down.

With that, Lantz managed to get a rewritten bill heard by the House Puget Sound Water Quality Committee instead of the openly hostile Natural Resources Committee. On March 6, 2007, the legislature passed her geoduck legislation, which funded studies by Washington Sea Grant and set up the 14-member Shellfish Aquaculture Regulatory Committee representing the shellfish industry, the environmental community, shoreline property owners, tribal governments, and the Departments of Ecology, Fish and Wildlife, Agriculture, and Natural Resources.

But Lantz is leaving the House in January, the legislature can’t appropriate money for more than two years, and the studies will run at least six.

Meanwhile, rather than taking British Columbia’s precautionary approach of waiting to see if intertidal geoduck farming is safe before committing to it, Washington will wait to see if it’s destructive before stopping it.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

For more on the geoduck issue, visit Washington’s Department of Ecology, Save Our Shoreline, or Taylor Shellfish Farms.