Community Engagement and Public Service Activities

Serve as the science boundary spanning organization for the Puget Sound recovery and protection effort.

The UW Puget Sound Institute serves as the science boundary spanning organization for the regional Puget Sound recovery and protection program.  PSI focuses on (1) synthesis and integration of scientific, technical, and policy information to support decision making, (2) support of key research efforts and the region's science community, and (3) communication of Puget Sound science in timely policy-ready products centered within the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound.

The objective of the proposed project is to quantify spatiotemporal patterns and primary drivers of arsenic mobility, bioavailability and ecological toxicity in urban lakes.

Our project will work to engage all urban lake-user communities (e.g., homeowners, beach users, fishermen) as well as regulatory agencies responsible for managing the urban water bodies. As a project, we already have strong connections with homeowners (e.g., Lake Killarney Improvement Association and City of Federal Way, which manages citizen involvement through Lake Management Districts for Steel and North Lakes), WA State Department of Ecology, King Country, Washington Lake Protection Association (see letters of support), WA Department of Fish and Wildlife, Tacoma-Pierce County Public Health, and the City of SeaTac. Through the Community Engagement Core (Core C) we have connections with EPA Region 10[RN1] and King County Public Health. For the homeowner community, project PIs have and will continue to attend local lake association meetings where we both present and receive feedback on our project, and directly involve homeowners in our research by soliciting volunteers to host instrumentation on their docks and collect stormwater samples (see 5.5….). These efforts have been well received, and we have been asked to come to future lake association meetings. To reach other lake-user communities, we have scheduled a meeting with our municipal, county, state and federal contacts to coordinate outreach and information gathering activities related to beach users and fishermen. We will continue to engage stakeholders throughout the project period to: (1) help guide sampling activities and data collection efforts (e.g. in past meetings, homeowners have raised concerns about arsenic in near-shore sediments, and in response, we agreed to sample and analyze arsenic in these sediments); (2) evaluate and include metrics needed by regulatory agencies to inform their lake management decisions; (3) to identify and conduct outreach efforts to stakeholders not currently included in our efforts (e.g. non-residential fishermen and lake users); and (4) assist with efforts to educate and communicate with lake-user communities to prevent arsenic exposure. Communication strategies between our project, lake-user communities and agency partners, as well as timelines and details of our bidirectional relationships are discussed in detail in the Core C proposal.

This is a two-term culminating studio project for the Master of Arts in Community Planning. Students worked in collaboration with external groups to examine opportunities for community development, climate justice, workforce development and sustainable land use on the East Side of the Thea Foss Waterway. 18 students worked in teams of 2-3 to examine seven key areas of opportunity in community-oriented tideflats development. Students conducted academic literature review and project scoping; mid-point presentation of applied research proposals, to community members and supporters; and year-end presentation to stakeholders and guests, hosted on the UWT campus.