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September
21, 2005
Council’s
Ballard Town Hall to Tackle Effort to Ensure “Clean Water
from Mountain to Sound”
The
Metropolitan King County Council’s next Town Hall Meeting
will come to one of the region’s traditional maritime communities
Monday, September 26, to discuss the region-wide
effort to ensure that future generations will have clean water from
“the Cascade Mountains to the Puget Sound.”
The
Ballard Elks, 6411 Seaview Ave NW, Seattle, will
host the Town Hall. The public is invited to meet face-to-face with
councilmembers at an informal reception starting at 9:30
a.m. The Town Hall will begin at 10:00 a.m.
“It
was not that long ago that people couldn’t swim in Lake Washington.
The regional cooperation that helped clean up Lake Washington now
faces the challenge of protecting the Puget Sound and the streams,
rivers and lakes of this region to ensure that our children and
grandchildren will not have to go on the internet to see what a
salmon looked like,” said Council Chair Larry
Phillips, whose district includes Ballard. “A community
whose history is tied to waterways of King County and Puget Sound
is the perfect location for both the public and the County Council
to celebrate past efforts and discuss future programs to protect
this precious resource.”
Among
the people scheduled to brief the public and Councilmembers on the
environmental and ecological challenges of protecting King County’s
waterways are:
• Charles V. (Tom) Gibbs, Former Executive
Director of Seattle Metro where he led the agency’s cleanup
of Lake Washington and Puget Sound
• Josh Baldi, Special Assistant to the Director
of the Washington state Department of Ecology
• Pam Bissonnette, Director,
King County Department of Natural Resources & Parks
• Daryl Williams, Director of the Department
of the Environment for the Tulalip Tribes, Member, Puget Sound Action
Team
• Kathy Fletcher, Executive Director, People
for Puget Sound
The
Town Hall meeting is part of Councilmembers’ initiative to
“get out of the courthouse” and into the communities
they serve, in order to enhance local representation on regional
issues. Each Town Hall is a special meeting of the Council’s
Committee-of-the-Whole, the only standing committee on which all
13 members serve. It considers complex legislation and policy issues
of interest to the entire council. This year’s Town Halls
have been held at Seattle’s New Holly Housing Complex, the
city of Des Moines, the campus of the University of Washington,
the city of Lake Forest Park, Emerald Downs Racetrack in Auburn,
the King County Fairgrounds in Enumclaw and the campus of Bellevue
Community College.
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