The Puget Sound Partnership is the state agency leading the region’s collective effort to restore and protect Puget Sound. The Puget Sound Partnership brings together hundreds of partners to mobilize partner action around a common agenda, advance Sound investments, and advance priority actions by supporting partners.

Vision

Vibrant, enduring natural systems and communities

Mission

Accelerate the collective effort to recover and sustain the Puget Sound

Our roles

The Partnership created and now manages the infrastructure needed to enable and encourage partners to come together to develop and implement priority actions needed to accelerate ecosystem recovery.

ALIGN THE WORK OF PARTNERS around a shared vision and strategy, the Puget Sound Action Agenda. We steward the effort to collaboratively build the Action Agenda so that recovery resources can be efficiently allocated based on a science-driven, prioritized system. We ensure decisionmakers are well-informed and have the information they need to advance these priorities.

ENSURE SMART INVESTMENTS through a shared, science-based system of measurement and monitoring that promotes accountability, effectiveness, and progress. This helps inform decisions about the most efficient and effective ways to allocate future investments.

SUPPORT PRIORITY ACTIONS by advancing policy and mobilizing funding needed for local and regional partners to succeed in achieving Puget Sound recovery goals. We strive to remove financial, regulatory, and resource barriers for our partners by directing outside resources toward priority actions, improving the policy and regulatory environment, and working as a catalyst within the system to get the job done.

6 recovery goals

The Washington State Legislature identified six ecosystem recovery goals for creating a resilient Puget Sound:

• Healthy Human Population—A healthy population supported by a healthy Puget Sound that is not threatened by changes in the ecosystem.
• Vibrant Quality of Life—A quality of human life that is sustained by a functioning Puget Sound ecosystem.
• Thriving Species and Food Web—Healthy and sustaining populations of native species in Puget Sound, including a robust food web.
• Protect and Restored Habitat—A healthy Puget Sound where freshwater, estuary, nearshore, marine, and upland habitats are protected, restored, and sustained.
• Abundant Water Quantity—An ecosystem that is supported by good groundwater levels as well as river and stream flows sufficient to sustain people, fish, wildlife, and the natural functions of the environment.
• Healthy Water Quality—Fresh and marine waters and sediments of a sufficient quality to support water that is safe for drinking, swimming, and other human uses and enjoyment, and which are not harmful to the native marine mammals, fish, birds, and shellfish in the region.

Funding

The Puget Sound Partnership receives the bulk of its funding from federal Puget Sound National Estuary Program dollars. For the 2015-17 biennium, the Partnership has a budget of $18.8 million, including $9.9 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agenda, $7.5 million from the State of Washington, and $1.4 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The greater Puget Sound ecosystem recovery effort is funded in number of ways, including local, state, tribal and federal government funding. Nonprofits, businesses, and foundations also make significant investments. The cost to implement the 2014-16 Action Agenda is estimated at $875 million.