Community engagement: planning successful public shoreline access and habitat restoration in urban industrial areas

Safe, accessible public shoreline access and restored fish and wildlife habitat are compatible with and critical to thriving urban industrial areas. Healthy restored habitat requires complexity and diversity, characteristics also indicative of resilient communities. Since 1980, the Port of Seattle has restored and enhanced 35 acres of marine and estuarine fish and wildlife habitat and provided 19 public shoreline access sites, totaling approximately 55 acres, with nine public shoreline access and six estuarine habitat restoration sites in south Elliott Bay and the Duwamish Waterway. The Duwamish Waterway sites are in the center of Seattle’s largest industrial area, employing approximately 80,000 people, in an area once consisting of 8.2 square miles of rich wetland and river habitat. The area is also home to two important residential neighborhoods, the South Park and Georgetown communities, adjacent to the Port’s Duwamish Waterway restoration and public access sites. The Port reflects on past community engagement efforts as they plan to restore 40 additional acres of fish and wildlife habitat and improve existing public access sites. In this session, the Port will discuss past community engagement efforts to provide mutually beneficial habitat and public access sites and share how those efforts influenced the Port’s decision-making process. The Port will also discuss their experience with the 2017-2018 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Near-port Community Capacity Building Pilot Project. The project seeks to improve partnerships between communities, particularly residents near large maritime cargo facilities, such as South Park and Georgetown, and port policy and decision-makers. Finally, the Port will highlight proposed habitat and public access projects including an approximately 13 acre combined estuarine wetland and public shoreline access site in South Park (Terminal 117) and kelp, eelgrass, and shellfish habitat improvements in north Elliott Bay (Smith Cove)