State officials have said the ruling, part of a decades-old legal battle tied to treaties dating to the mid-1800s, could cost billions of dollars — money the state doesn’t have.
– Associated Press
OLYMPIA — Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson is appealing a federal ruling ordering the state to fix culverts that block salmon passages.
The state on Tuesday filed a notice of appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on the March 29 U.S. District Court ruling by Judge Ricardo Martinez that set up a timeline to fix hundreds of culverts around the state.
“The state remains committed to doing more to address fish passage barriers and will continue to do so as resources permit. The implications of the case, however, stretch beyond culverts. Issues of this magnitude deserve full and thoughtful appellate review,” said Attorney General Bob Ferguson in a statement.
State officials have said the ruling could cost billions of dollars — money the state doesn’t have.
The Martinez ruling is part of a decades-old legal battle tied to treaties dating to the mid-1800s. Tribes say the state has blocked salmon passage and contributed to the decline of fish harvests.
More than 20 tribes signed up for the legal action, including the Confederated Bands and Tribes of the Yakama Indian Nation, Tulalip Tribes, Makah Nation and Muckleshoot Indian Tribe.
Culverts are often built under roadways to allow streams to flow under them.
Martinez ordered the state to fix approximately 180 culverts on recreational lands by 2016 and more than 800 culverts under the Department of Transportation by 2030.
State agencies told lawmakers in April that the ruling would cost more than $2.4 billion. The state could meet the repair deadline imposed by Martinez, if the money is provided
Martinez said in his decision that the tribes have been harmed economically, socially, educationally and culturally because of reduced salmon harvests caused by state barriers that prevent fish passage. He compared spending on culvert correction with the overall Department of Transportation budget and said the state has the financial ability to accelerate the pace of its fixes over the next several years.
Sustainability truly matters to the tribes. The rivers and the fish kept them alive. Their natural resources provided them with jobs. They still want—and need—to provide jobs. And sustainability can help do that.
That’s one of the main reasons why investing in sustainable companies, partnerships and projects that have a chance to change the future makes a lot of sense for the tribes today.
The tribes have always prioritized the health of their environment, and I strongly believe that the economic and social conditions are ripe for them to contribute meaningfully to environmental improvement right now.
I used to be a tribal fisherman who dug clams, but now I’m a consultant who advises the tribes when it comes to natural resources, economic development and environmental protection.
As part of my upbringing, and part of my current job, I know how important it is for the tribes to diversify their holdings beyond gaming. But I also know that this diversification absolutely must preserve the tribes’ ethical and social values. This is simply non-negotiable.
Indeed, many green technologies need investment, and those tribes whose economic resources permit can play an important role by providing financial support that allows profit-oriented enterprises in this area to thrive.
Looking forward, the alignment of environmental values and economic opportunity creates a synergistic benefit for future tribe generations. Greater wealth helps all tribe members, and a better environment leads to increased health for the tribes, too.
There’s also long-lasting tribe pride in having enhanced both the economy and the environment.
I’ve seen several good examples that illustrate how the tribes are achieving both these goals through smart sustainability investing and commitments.
Washington State-based MicroGREEN, for example, is transforming recycled water bottles into recyclable products for retail, food-service and packaging needs. The company is the closest thing to full-cycle recycling I’ve seen. And it’s a rare kind of business, because it can make money and still be good for the environment. Some day in the future, I believe that MicroGREEN’s cups will be ubiquitous, and the tribes that have invested in it will be very proud.
In the wind-power market, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes are installing wind turbines on their land in order to offset fossil fuels and power all operations with wind energy. This move is expected to save more than $9 million for the tribes over the next four decades. In the past, the tribes have spent more than $200,000 a month for electricity, including generators that help power its casinos.
One of the nation’s first 100 percent Native American-owned-and-operated renewable energy companies can be found on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Founded in 2006, Lakota Solar Enterprises (LSE) manufactures solar air collectors and complete supplemental solar heating systems. It also provides employment and green-jobs training for Native Americans.
Meanwhile, the Confederate Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) in Montana are developing a pioneering project aimed at creating a viable biofuel industry using waste wood that blankets the region’s vast forestlands. The CSKT have agreed to partner with a team of researchers from the Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance (NARA) on an expansive $40 million research project. NARA is a broad collective of scientists and engineers from public universities and private industry that is studying the feasibility of creating jet fuel using wood debris and residuals.
Working with companies that prioritize environmental sustainability, such as MicroGREEN, will help the tribes diversify their economies and help green, in a cost effective way, their gaming operations if they have them.”
Bob Whitener is a member of the Squaxin Island Tribe and co-owner and managing partner of The Whitener Group with his brother Ron. The Whitener Group is a consulting firm dedicated to the sustainability and advancement of tribes. The company advises Indian Tribes, as well as businesses and organizations that want to work with tribes to advance tribal objectives. Prior to The Whitener Group’s establishment in 2009, Bob Whitener served as the CEO/Board President for Island Enterprises Inc., the tribe’s economic development corporation, for more than 8 years. And before he created the Island Enterprises Inc., Bob served for over 6 years as the executive director of the Squaxin Island Tribe.
Lauren Salcedo A young raccoon is fed and weighed at Sarvey Wildlife Care Center in Arlington
By Lauren Salcedo, Arlington Times
ARLINGTON — The Sarvey Wildlife Care Center has already faced a budget shortfall this year and now, in their busiest season, they face a shortage of another sort — volunteers.
In late April, hundreds of Comcast volunteers helped to complete a list of projects that Sarvey had struggled to complete with a sudden lack of regular volunteers.
“They did landscaping and dug up a bunch of overgrown areas,” said Suzanne West, director. “They planted us a garden so we have things out there growing for our animals — herbs, broccoli — that we can feed to our rabbits and squirrels.”
Comcast employees also helped by painting the center’s education building, while children washed vehicles and windows.
“It seemed like every time I turned around they were doing something to help,” said West. “I love the idea that employers in the area are giving their employees a day off to go volunteer. We are really in need of volunteers right now. We have the lowest numbers we’ve ever had at the start of the season. Right now we have about 30 regular volunteers, and we need about 100. We appreciate anyone who can come volunteer, whether for a whole day or a shift once a week. We need the help.”
The spring and early summer season means that the wildlife center receives an influx of injured or orphaned animals. It’s their busiest time of the year — now they have more work and less workers.
“I think that a lot of it has to do with the economy,” said West. “We just lost a couple of our regular volunteers because they got jobs.”
Jane Towle works for Seattle Specialty Insurance in Everett, and her company gave her and other employees a day off for volunteer service.
“They let us have one day off a year to volunteer for whatever cause you’d like to,” said Towle, who spent her first volunteering experience helping Sarvey Wildlife. “This is my first experience here. It’s very nice. I would love to come back and volunteer more regularly.”
Science EXPO Day is a festive, one-day event featuring over 150 booths, activities, demonstrations, and performances that celebrate science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and show how integral they are to the region’s culture and prosperity. In addition to Science EXPO Day, Seattle Center will host the Seattle Mini Maker Faire and the Pagdiriwang Philippine Cultural Festival.
Program Highlights
Science EXPO Day is filled with fun and educational programs, including over 150 engaging exhibits, an introduction to Geocaching, the 2013 Laser Roadshow, “an Amazing Glimpse into Lasers, Optics, and Photonics!” and a full day of Stage Programming.
Exhibit Highlights Organizations from across the region will be on-site to demonstrate how the STEM fields contribute to their work. Don’t miss the amazing exhibits and activities, including a submarine, near space satellites, underwater robots, real-time 3D modeling withMicrosoft Kinect and a bilingual inflatable colon.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times A plane arriving with a patient at the airport in Bethel, Alaska.
By KIRK JOHNSON
May 28, 2013 The New York Times
BETHEL, Alaska — Americans in some rural places fret at how far away big-city medical help might be in an emergency, or at the long drives they are forced to make for prenatal care, or stitches, or chemotherapy.
Dr. Ellen Hodges only wishes it could be so easy.
She oversees health care for a population of 28,000, mostly Alaska Natives, here in the state’s far west end, spread out over an area the size of Oregon that has almost no roads. People can travel by boat or snow machine at certain times of the year, but not right now: the Kuskokwim River, which wends through Bethel to the Bering Sea, is choked with unstable melting ice in late May, magnifying the isolation that defines everything in what may be America’s emptiest corner.
“If you have a road, you’re not remote,” Dr. Hodges said.
The complex machinery of health care is being reimagined everywhere in the nation through the combined prism of new regulations and shifting economics, even here on the continent’s frosted fringe.
The grandly named Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation, for example, where Dr. Hodges is chief of staff, is scrambling this spring to install a new electronic medical records system. That is a hallmark of the federal health care overhaul, compounded out here by the fact that computers run by generators in far-flung villages are subject to brownouts and fuel shortages.
Cost controls are also the way of the medical frontier no matter where you look. In other places, such constraints may be driven by insurance companies; here, by sequester-driven budget cuts to the federal Indian Health Service. The agency is the 50-bed hospital’s main support in treating the tribes and villagers who have lived for thousands of years in the boggy crescent of lowlands where the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers carve their paths to the sea.
The 56 tribes in the region voted in the mid-1990s to bundle their health care money from the federal government to finance the hospital. Grants supplement the work.
But the one thing that shapes every care decision, from the routine to the catastrophic, is the map. Triage in medical decisions, logistics and money is all filtered through an equation of time and distance on a vast and mostly untracked land.
Is air transport justified for medical reasons? Too slow to make a difference? Too dangerous in bad weather to attempt? What should a health worker on the ground — in most villages a local resident trained by the hospital — be told to do, or not do?
“There are judgment calls that you never have to make in the lower 48,” said Dr. David Bielak, 31, a family medicine practitioner who started coming here last fall in temporary stints from his home near San Jose, Calif.
And many of those decisions, often based on telephone descriptions from a villager, can be weighty. None of the more than four dozen communities served by the hospital have a doctor in residence.
“It’s the middle of the night, and you get a call from a clinic way up in the middle of nowhere where something very, very strange has happened,” Dr. Bielak said. “A lot of it is dark: a lot of alcoholism, suicidal ideation, a lot of abuse.”
A lack of running water and sewer systems in many villages in turn compounds the struggle to make, or keep, people well in a place long marked by poverty and isolation.
Take a glimpse, for example, into Alexandria Tikiun’s world: At age 25, with four children at home to care for, she is a community health aide, the closest thing to an M.D. in her village, Atmautluak, population about 400.
The aide system itself is uniquely Alaskan. It was developed in the 1950s, during an outbreak of tuberculosis, when the first health aides were trained to dispense medicine. Now, in sessions here at the hospital, Ms. Tikiun and 150 other aides, mostly women, learn medical skills that include trauma response, pregnancy testing and vaccination, all based on a book that they call their bible, which walks them through a kind of algorithm of step-by-step questions leading to treatment protocols.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 28, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of tribes that voted in the mid-1990s to bundle their health care money from the federal government to finance a hospital. It was 56, not 58.
A bipartisan group of Virginia lawmakers is fighting to win federal recognition of six tribes in the commonwealth.
The tribes have treaties dating back to the 1600s. But there ‘s a catch: the agreements are with the King of England. Even now, the UK recognizes and honors these American tribes, while the US government doesn’t. That’s partly because in 1924, a law was passed that declared Virginia contained no Native Americans and wiped the commonwealth’s record books of their history.
The six tribes are fighting for federal recognition that would provide them educational and health care benefits enjoyed by other tribes. That also would allow them to collect their ancestors remains kept in the Smithsonian.
The House has passed legislation recognizing Virginia ‘s tribes twice. So has a Senate committee, but the full upper chamber has never recognized the tribes.
While optimistic, supporters say the legislation won’t likely come up until near the end of this session. Which means after about a 400-year wait, these tribes continue to wait.
Will Stelle, the regional administrator of NOAA Fisheries, gives a thorough explanation on the federal perspective of salmon recovery and Treaty Rights at Risk. Stelle spoke during the 2013 Salmon Recovery Conference two weeks ago in Vacouver, WA.
Work is set to begin this summer to restore salmon habitat in Illabot Creek, a tributary to the Skagit River.
Once a winding, multi-channeled creek, Illabot was straightened and diked in 1970 when a bridge crossing was constructed on Rockport-Cascade Road. Straightening the creek degraded salmon habitat by creating a steeper gradient, reducing channel area and habitat complexity.
Illabot Creek is a highly productive tributary to the upper Skagit River, supporting chinook, chum, coho and pink salmon, native char and steelhead trout. Much of the watershed already has been protected or restored, but this half-mile reach on the historic alluvial fan remains heavily degraded.
The Skagit River System Cooperative (SRSC), the natural resources extension of the Swinomish and Sauk-Suiattle tribes, plans to restore Illabot Creek to its historic channel by removing dikes downstream of the road and excavating to encourage new channels to develop.
“Not only will the restoration improve channel complexity and instream habitat conditions, but it also will restore connectivity within the floodplain and increase the number and surface area of channels as Illabot Creek migrates over time,” said Devin Smith, senior restoration ecologist with SRSC.
Future restoration plans include installing two new bridges and removing dikes upstream of the road.
Acrow Bridges An Acrow bridge used at ground zero in New York City. Acrow is building a temporary span to replace the portion of the Skagit River Bridge that collapsed last week.
Jerry Cornfield, The Herald
Construction of a 160-foot steel Band-Aid for the Skagit River Bridge began Tuesday while a meticulous examination of the damaged section continued above and below the water.
Acrow Bridge is building the temporary span in pieces on a closed stretch of I-5 to be rolled into place for final assembly once the National Transportation Safety Board completes its work and demolition crews clear away the remains of the collapsed segment.
The Department of Transportation didn’t say how much the temporary bridge costs, but said it would be part of the $15 million emergency contract awarded to Atkinson Construction in Renton to clear the wreckage and rebuild the bridge.
Gov. Jay Inslee is pushing for a mid-June reopening, and state transportation officials say the timeline is doable but caution against chiseling in a date.
There’s no plan to hurry the federal authorities or rush the cleanup. Plus, state bridge experts must still examine the steel and concrete piers that supported the collapsed span to be sure they can be used for the replacement.
“We do have some challenges ahead of us,” said Travis Phelps of the DOT. “We are going to do our best to meet that timeline. We want to be sure it is done right and safe. This work ain’t easy.”
Tuesday brought word that Acrow Bridge, a 62-year-old New Jersey bridge-building firm, will construct the temporary four-lane segment to replace the section that crumbled into the Skagit River on May 23.
When completed, it will consist of two prefabricated steel bridges installed side by side. Each piece will be 160 feet long and 24 feet wide, which is wide enough to support two lanes of traffic. The road will have an asphalt overlay or a factory-applied aggregate anti-skid finish, according to a company spokeswoman.
When the bridge reopens, just about every vehicle, commercial truck and tractor-trailer allowed to travel on it before the incident will be able to travel on it again, Phelps said.
Transportation officials will set a maximum vehicle weight to be allowed on the temporary bridge. Overweight vehicles, referred to as super loads, are not going to be permitted, he said.
Some trucks with oversized loads, like the one that struck the bridge and caused the collapse, could use the bridge if they do not exceed the weight limit, he said. They will need to comply with existing rules, such as use of a pilot car with a height rod, he said.
Speed will be reduced on the bridge because the lanes will be narrower, there will be little or no shoulder and some type of barrier will be in place dividing the northbound and southbound lanes, Phelps said.
Acrow Bridge, which has an office in Camas, Wash., specializes in pre-fabricated modular steel bridges. It has built similar bridges to replace ones damaged in hurricanes Katrina, Irene and Sandy, according to the company.
Meanwhile Tuesday, Inslee moved to assist retailers who’ve seen business plummet since the span tumbled into the river, fracturing one of the major trade and travel corridors on the West Coast.
He approved using $150,000 of the state’s Economic Development Strategic Reserve Account to support economic activity in Skagit County and surrounding areas.
None of the money can go directly to a business, according to the governor’s office. The Department of Commerce will use the money for a media campaign focused on informing the public that the region’s businesses and attractions are open and how best to get there. Island, Whatcom and San Juan counties also will be involved.
The Washington State Patrol has beefed up its presence along the detour routes due to complaints of semi-trucks and cars with trailers running red lights and blocking intersections when traffic signals turn red. Both are infractions and can result in a $124 ticket, according to the state patrol.
“We understand the detours are an inconvenience for motorists but we want to make the routes as safe as possible. Motorists need to pack their patience while these detours are in place,” Trooper Mark Francis said in a statement issued Tuesday.
If you want to look straight down at one of the Seven Wonders of the World, be sure to take a wallet full of cash.
The Hualapai Tribe Skywalk at Grand Canyon West Photo courtesy of Hualapai Tribe
The glass-bottomed Skywalk at Grand Canyon West, a horseshoe-shaped bridge that juts out from the Canyon walls some 70 feet into pure, empty space, has seen its share of difficulties since long before it opened in 2007. The Hualapai Tribe, which owns and operates the tourist attraction, has battled forces both internal – factions within the tribe argued that the structure was defiling sacred ground – and external. Environmentalists believed the bridge was an incongruous eyesore and the original developer of the $31 million project, Grand Canyon Skywalk Development of Las Vegas, won a $28 million judgment against the tribe. The court agreed with David Jin, creator of the spectacle, who maintained that his contract called for GCSD to receive half of the attraction’s revenue in return for fronting the money to build it.
Shortly after the Skywalk opened, though, the tribe took it back from Jin’s company, claiming GCSD hadn’t finished the job. Jin countered by blaming the lack of completion on the tribe’s failure to provide infrastructure, and the back-and-forth ultimately resulted in the tribe’s choice to invoke eminent domain and seize the bridge.
The loss of the court battle earlier this year was a huge blow to the Hualapai, who have seen other business ventures fall by the wayside on their sprawling reservation south of the Canyon and west of the National Park.
This past weekend, a neighbor dealt the tribe another blow. Nigel Turner, owner of the 168-square-mile Grand Canyon Ranch, said he was tired of the tourists and the traffic that crossed his land on the way to the Skywalk, and that’s why he decided to start charging a $20 toll. For that fee, tourists, primarily those coming from Las Vegas, can enjoy a rodeo show and other ranch activities, but the already hurting tribe says the charge is inappropriate, based on a 2008 settlement that netted Turner $750,000 and gave the tribe an easement across his land.
Once again, the Hualapai and their ambitions seem certain to be headed for court in this dispute. It’s hard to say which side has right on its side, but it certainly begs the question of whether the tribe’s minority was right in objecting to the building of the attraction in the first place.
