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GSL642KingCountyCase.pdf

Kennedy School of Government Case Program C16-09-1906.0

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This case was written by Pamela Varley, senior case writer at the Harvard Kennedy School. It was sponsored by John Donahue, Raymond Vernon Lecturer in Public Policy, and funded by the Robert G. Wilmers Local & State Government Case Studies Fund. (0509)

Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. No part of this publication may be reproduced, revised, translated, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the written permission of the Case Program. For orders and copyright permission information, please visit our website at www.ksgcase.harvard.edu or send a written request to Case Program, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

The Challenge of Adapting to Climate Change: King County Brings Local Action to a Global Threat

Introduction

In 2005, King County Executive Ron Sims, the top elected official in Washington State’s largest and most diverse county, decided to take a risk. He pledged to take a leadership role on global warming, including the nearly uncharted realm of “adaptation”—preparing at the local level for impacts of climate change considered inevitable.

At the time, most local and regional leaders in the United States had not engaged the climate change issue. The few exceptions had typically promoted modest “mitigation” efforts— that is, policies that encouraged the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions1 in an effort to head off the worst impacts of climate change. To take up adaptation was a big leap—an acknowledgement that, even if the human production of greenhouse gases were to cease overnight, it would take decades and longer2

Adaptation posed major challenges for an elected official. In a world governed by short- term election cycles, it required long-term thinking. Even harder, it forced a confrontation with uncertainty. Climate science was able to explain the general pattern of changes likely in a region over a period of 50 years or more. But the natural variability of climate and the complex interplay

for climate-changing gases already in the atmosphere to dissipate. In the meantime, weather patterns would change—in some locations, to drastic effect.

1 Greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, are those that absorb and emit radiation

within the thermal infrared range, causing a warming effect on earth. The emission of these and other greenhouse gases occurs naturally, to some degree, but with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, human activity—especially energy generation, vehicle transport, and industrial processing—has caused a marked increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

2 For carbon dioxide, it was expected to take longer than a century.

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of land, water and atmosphere in a given location made it harder to predict exactly how, where, or when such impacts would play out.

Sims’ challenge, therefore, was to persuade his colleagues in local government to arm against dangers that were not yet clear or present. The idea of adapting to climate change filled some officials with skepticism (weren’t the dire predictions alarmist?) and others, with fatalism (wasn’t it all rather hopeless?). Above all, the issue made people uncomfortable. “The question of how do you adapt?—it’s something that people still don’t want to talk about,” says Sims, “because it’s an admission of political failure on an international scale, and a domestic one.”

A Personal Crossroads

In early 2005, Ron Sims was heading into his third election for King County executive, a position he had held since 1996.3

But Sims was, irrepressibly, a big-picture thinker. In the eyes of his supporters, he was visionary, open-minded, bold, and optimistic—a man with a warm, persuasive style and (famously) a tendency to bestow hugs on friend and foe alike. An African American born in 1948, Sims had marched alongside his parents during the civil rights movement and had grown up expecting to take personal and professional risks for the causes he cared about. “Ron, more so than any other elected official I’ve ever seen, spends political capital,” observes his chief of staff, Kurt Triplett.

With an annual budget of $2.4 billion and a workforce of 13,000, King County was the largest regional government in the Pacific Northwest and the 14th largest county in the nation. Sims was popular and was expected to win re-election easily. That said, he was, in certain respects, an unlikely person to find at the helm of county government. Most counties—even one as large as King County—tended to preside over a portfolio of services that, however crucial (sewage treatment, landfill management, regional bus service, prison administration, etc.) were viewed as mundane. County executives were generally expected to be competent nuts-and-bolts managers, not charismatic innovators.

Most [elected officials] amass it. They gather and they gather and they gather and they never spend it. Ron pays it out as soon as he gets it. He always gives us the same speech: “Tomorrow is not promised to anyone, so act. Act.”

Sims was politically progressive, focusing his energy on environmental initiatives, growth management strategies, preservation of green space, a campaign to end homelessness, and the

3 King County was governed by an executive elected every four years, who worked in concert with the nine elected

members of the King County Council. Sims had initially been appointed to the position, to fill out the term of the previous executive when he was elected state governor. He was subsequently elected to the county executive post in 1997 and 2001. D o

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provision of health care to uninsured children. This profile made him popular in King County, which included liberal, “green” Seattle and its suburbs. But on the two occasions he had sought statewide office—a challenge to US Sen. Slade Gorton in 1994 and, more recently, a 2004 bid to be Washington state governor—he had lost, decisively.

In late 2004 and early 2005, after his bruising 2004 defeat in the gubernatorial primary, Sims paused to take stock of his political future. Disappointed at losing the chance for leadership on a larger platform, he asked himself whether, as King County executive, he might, in Triplett’s words, “use the office of the executive slightly differently than it had ever been used before—less as a steward of government and more as a transformer of government.” Sims sought to re-imagine local/regional government as an engine of creativity—an “ideopolis”—and a laboratory for testing new ideas.

Triplett was enthusiastic about the idea. With climate change poised to become a major issue across the country, Sims was in a position to make a useful contribution to the national dialog, Triplett believed—and if Sims were to become a recognized leader on the topic, that would redound to the County’s benefit. “The two reinforce each other,” he says. The idea was “to try to use our success to raise our stature, to raise our credibility, to create more success.”

Stepping Up on Climate Change

Sims was no newcomer to the climate change issue. As far back as 1988, when he was a member of the King County Council, Sims and a colleague had proposed the creation of a County office to study the global warming issue—an idea that, at the time, met withering ridicule from the press and a decisive “no” vote from the council.

But in the 1990s and early 2000s, the County had adopted a number of “green” land use, transit, and environmental management policies that—if not conceived as a response to global warming, per se—did have the effect of cutting down the County’s greenhouse gas emissions.4 Because Washington State derived 50 percent of its electrical energy from hydropower, rather than fossil fuels, the State’s greatest source of greenhouse gases was vehicle emissions.5

4 During this period, there was a growing consensus among climate scientists that human production of greenhouse

gases was causing an increase in global temperature.

King County had taken a number of steps to get residents out of their cars. A 175-mile network of biking, hiking, and walking trails encouraged walking and cycling. An award-winning partnership with local businesses created incentives for commuters to carpool or use public transit. And the County had moved to improve the emissions profile of its own vehicles—buying hybrid cars and buses, using

5 Nationwide, electricity accounted for 39 percent of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions, transportation for 32 percent, industry for 18 percent. The remaining 10 percent was produced by multiple smaller sources. In King County, transportation accounted for 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, electricity for 10 percent, industry for 10 percent. The remaining 20 percent was produced by multiple sources. (King County data, February 2002.) D o

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low sulfur diesel fuel and a 5 percent bio-diesel mix, and looking into vehicles that ran on compressed natural gas and electricity.6 At levels well above the Environmental Protection Agency standard, the County’s landfills and wastewater treatment plants were capturing methane, another damaging greenhouse gas, and converting it to energy.7

In addition, Sims had consistently supported state, county, and city land use policies that encouraged dense, mixed-use urban developments and discouraged sprawl. (Urban sprawl not only reduced green space, it ensured an increase in commuter traffic.) By 2005, King County had reinforced such policies with the purchase of land or development rights for 125,000 acres of forestland, to keep it safe in perpetuity—a strategy that, on balance, Sims favored over zoning, which, he says, “is only as good as the political moment.” Not only was the forestland a hedge against urban sprawl, it was a “carbon sink” that absorbed carbon dioxide from other sources and a “sponge” that held water in the ground (an advantage in a region that was experiencing drought conditions with increasing frequency). In 2003, King County had also created an elaborate inventory of greenhouse gas emissions in the County, allowing analysts to chart progress (or backsliding) in their reduction.

The “green” initiatives already in the works placed King County well ahead of most local governments, even though Sims had never declared climate change mitigation, per se, a priority of his administration. But in 2005, in consultation with Triplett and other advisers, he decided the time had come to do so. As a first step in taking a leadership role on the issue regionally, Sims decided King County would host an area-wide conference about climate change.

The next task was to find a compelling focus for the conference. With dramatic footage of polar ice melts in the news, along with the ratification of the international Kyoto Protocol 8

6 By 2005, the County had purchased 213 hybrid diesel buses and 140 hybrid cars.

by all major countries except the United States, the US public was coming to accept climate change as a genuine phenomenon. How to seize on that shift? And how might King County complement—and distinguish itself—from the high profile climate change initiative just undertaken in its flagship city of Seattle? On Feb. 16, 2005, ratification day for the Kyoto Protocol, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels issued a challenge to cities across the country to sign a pledge promising to “meet or beat” the Kyoto target that had been set for the United States—a 7 percent reduction of 1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 2012. Nickels’ initiative, standing in defiance of the Bush Administration, had received a great deal of media attention. Sims supported Nickels’ move, but wanted to stake out

7 The greenhouse effect of methane was especially potent—23 times that of carbon dioxide. King County was participating in an EPA demonstration project, using methane gas from a wastewater treatment plant to power a fuel cell.

8 The Kyoto Protocol established country-specific standards for the reduction of greenhouse gases. It was created in 1997 under the terms of a larger international environmental treaty developed at the United Nations “Earth Summit” in June 1992. On Feb. 16, 2005, it was ratified by 141 countries. D o

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different territory for King County.9

A Lively Debate

In thinking about how to focus a regional climate change conference, Sims and his executive team sought advice from the County’s scientifically-trained and environmentally-oriented director of Natural Resources and Parks, Pam Bissonnette.

When Bissonnette brought Sims’ question to the climate change experts on her staff, a lively debate ensued. On one side, Don Theiler, director of the County’s Wastewater Division, proposed the topic of climate change adaptation. Among climate change experts, there was widespread agreement that, even if greenhouse gas emissions were to halt immediately, the change would have little effect on global warming impacts over the next 30 years. A coordinated mitigation campaign could help reduce the severity of longer range impacts, but some changes were well underway and could not be avoided. It was incumbent on state and local governments to learn what was in store, and to prepare for it, Theiler argued. Bottom line: adaptation was a compelling, cutting edge issue that was likely to arouse interest.

In activist environmental circles, however, the prevailing wisdom about discussing inevitable impacts of climate change was simple: “Don’t go there.” Within DNRP, the leading voice for this point of view was Doug Howell, climate change project manager. Environmental campaigns calling for greenhouse gas reductions were only just beginning to gain traction. “It seemed unfathomable that we would try to take on a whole new body of work on adaptation—that if we did, it would suck out both financial resources and political will,” Howell says. In addition, he adds, research indicated that public opinion about global warming tended to extremes. Either the public dismissed the problem, believing that if the situation were truly dangerous, someone would already have done something about it, or the public became overwhelmed and despairing, believing it was now too late to do anything. Howell argued that a conference laying out inevitable impacts would play into the latter, and seriously undermine the global warming mitigation campaign.10

Sims, however, rejected the idea that there was any need to choose between mitigation and adaptation. It was, he argued, like saying a person had to choose “between eating and drinking”; of course government had to do both. And while it was true that care must be taken not to frighten and overwhelm the public, Sims—soft spoken and upbeat—believed he could convey a message of hope: “I look at the age of global warming, I say why be in despair?” he says. “Despair is easy, its natural, but it is really dull. The key is to be excited about the prospect of change.” Sims believed that global warming would lead to a green revolution, just as monumental as the agricultural,

9 It was a commonplace joke in the Seattle area, in the mid to late 2000s, that Sims and Nickels were engaged in a

competition to “out-green” each other. 10 Howell would later come to believe that he had been mistaken—that, if managed with care, a focus on adaptation

could serve to reinforce mitigation efforts. D o

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industrial, and computer revolutions. None of those had served to raise the poor out of their poverty—but he believed the green revolution was going to give the world another chance, community by community: “The green age—green industries—those are the jobs we want to prepare people for. If we migrate 40,000 adults into prevailing wage jobs, it would end poverty in King County.”11

What’s more, Sims firmly believed that, as a practical matter, responsibility for climate change impacts would fall to local government. In this respect, the adaptation issue was categorically different from mitigation. While all levels of government must, arguably, help in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, no city or county government, alone, could change its own climate fate. By contrast, only local or regional government could see, anticipate, and address the myriad local impacts of climate change. If there were a sea level rise in Puget Sound, some of King County’s seaside wastewater pumping facilities might be inundated, leading to sewage flooding; only the County could anticipate and prevent that. If higher temperatures created “heat islands” in poor neighborhoods, which tended to have relatively more asphalt and relatively less open space than their middle class counterparts, the County must try to mitigate the impact and be alert to an increase in heat-related ailments.

In fact, Sims viewed climate change impacts as an extension of the County’s overall responsibility for emergency preparedness. Sims had long believed the federal government had limited capacity to ride to local government’s rescue in an emergency. For that reason, Sims had recently made pandemic flu planning a priority for the County health department. In event of epidemic, storm, wildfire, earthquake, or climate change calamity, Sims believed, King County, like all local and regional governments, would either be ready or it would not—and the difference would be enormously consequential.

Sims and Adaptation

Sims’ advisors also believed that the Executive’s strengths and predilections made him an especially good person to take on the adaptation challenge. For example, many elected officials were uncomfortable when asked to look more than a few years into the future. “Politics thinks for the immediate,” Sims says, “It thinks in terms of being re-elected—and it’s designed to do that.” But Sims not only had tolerance for long-term thinking—he positively relished it. In the spring of 2005, Sims presented his cabinet-level staff with a report outlining what King County would be like

11 Quotations in this paragraph from “Shared Prosperity in an Age of Global Warming: King County’s Vision for an

Equitable Clean Energy Economy,” speech by Ron Sims, at the Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Oceans, Jan. 30, 2008. Sims also argued that certain effects of global warming—for instance, “heat islands” in dense urban neighborhoods—were likely to have a disproportionate effect on the poor. D o

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in 2050, if present trends went unchanged. He urged them to work backward from the predictions in developing their own goals and recommendations.12

To grapple with climate change was also to confront scientific uncertainty. Climate scientists were able to project impacts on a large scale, and were working on “downscaling” to smaller and more specific regions, but that was a work in progress. Much remained speculative, and as a consequence, many elected officials were reluctant to engage the issue. But Sims, a science hobbyist from an early age, enjoyed the unfolding discoveries of science, mess and all.

In fact, Sims had put this philosophy to work in developing plans for the County’s new Brightwater Wastewater Treatment Center, which would come before the King County Council for a final vote in the late fall of 2005. The Brightwater plant included a technology to clean local wastewater so thoroughly, it met the standard for “reclaimed water” (not suitable for drinking but appropriate for many other uses). Sims’ proposal included an additional $28 million for a feature that would allow the County, in future, to deliver this reclaimed water to customers for use in industry, agriculture, street-washing, etc. The future need for this water was uncertain, but the possibility of a serious shortage of reservoir water was one of the climate change impacts most feared in the Puget Sound region.

He believed it was far better to act on the best scientific predictions of the day—and risk making a mistake—than to ignore science that was not yet conclusive.

Sims called this investment a “no regrets” choice—one that, if it proved unnecessary, might waste a few pennies on the dollar (the total project cost was $1.8 billion), but that, if needed, would prove a godsend, securing a drought-proof source of some 36 million gallons of reclaimed water per day. “We weren’t saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, we’ve got to completely re-do all of our sewage plants for reclaimed water,’” emphasizes Triplett. “We were trying to be smart investors. We said, ‘The ones we’re building now—let’s [build them] so that there are options for the region in the future.’”

This approach was not universally embraced. The County’s predominant water purveyor, the City of Seattle, vigorously opposed the proposed addition, on grounds that there was not enough evidence of future water shortage to justify the added expense. The overall price tag of the Brightwater project should not blind decision makers to the fact that $28 million was a major public investment, argued Seattle Public Utilities Director Chuck Clarke. In contrast to Sims’ “no

12 The brief “Focus 2050” report, completed in June 2005, focused largely on population growth—projected to

increase 64 percent in the three-county Puget Sound region—with resulting strains in health care, housing and transportation sectors.

13 In fact, within King County government, Sims was famous for his middle-of-the-night emails to staff passing along interesting scientific articles and links. Pam Bissonnette recalls the time he leaned over to her, during a staff retreat, “and he said, ‘Pam, I was on the internet recently, and I found that there’s a termite that will secrete oxygen, from its gut.’” Could the County make use of them, somehow, he wondered, then asked hopefully, “Have you thought about that?” Bissonnette laughs, “You can’t stay in front of Ron—you just can’t.” D o

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regrets” philosophy, Clarke favored a “just-in-time” planning approach—aggressively gathering and assessing data about the region’s water supply, but holding off on capital investments until the need to make them was clear. If the region did, in fact, find it needed additional water resources in future, decision makers could weigh a range of options at that time, he argued—and there might be cheaper or better options than King County’s reclaimed water.14

Because of the Brightwater debate, Sims had already done some thinking about climate change adaptation when Theiler proposed the topic for King County’s climate change conference. “On the political side, we swiftly recognized that there was a giant niche there that nobody was filling,” says Triplett. But when Sims approved the idea, he adds, it was largely because the topic had caught his interest and he was curious to learn more. “He said, ‘Create the conference I want to go to. I want to know, what does the future look like?’” Triplett recalls. “So that was really the driver.”

‘The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be’

By the time the County had settled on its conference theme, the Department of Natural Resources and Parks had little more than half a year to plan the conference—tight timing, says Howell, for a conference of this magnitude. On the positive side, King County had an unusual academic climate resource at the University of Washington in Seattle—the Climate Impacts Group (CIG), a cross-disciplinary research team that included hydrologists, meteorologists, and oceanographers funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to conduct research on the impacts of climate variability and climate change on the Pacific Northwest.

The DNRP conference planners immediately turned to their CIG friends and colleagues and proposed a collaborative effort. They hoped that CIG would not only help them frame the issues, but also provide Sims with insulation against the charge of being alarmist. “In 2005, there was still a lot of confusion and debate about climate change,” says Triplett. “The public had the impression there was much more debate than there really was in the scientific community.

I think our big breakthrough was this idea of third party validation— “3PV.” It wasn’t [just] Ron Sims saying this, it was the University of Washington, this bastion of excellence and integrity that everybody respects, saying this.

CIG’s leadership was immediately receptive to the conference idea. One of the group’s central missions was to serve as a resource for policymakers. CIG had found, as a general rule, that

14 Not surprisingly, perhaps, political concerns muddied the debate. Some charged that King County, which did not

own a water reservoir or sell any water, was trying to nudge its way into the water business through a back door. Others charged that Seattle was jealously guarding its own present-day water revenues at the expense of ensuring an adequate future supply. Complicating the picture, a consortium of suburbs, led by affluent Bellevue, was angling to convert a defunct hydropower reservoir to a drinking reservoir—a project that, if approved, would significantly reduce the customer base for Seattle water in the coming ten years. D o

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it was relatively easy to engage with the technical and scientific staff of government agencies but far harder to do so with elected officials. Sims’ decision to take a public leadership role on the issue, therefore, was a breakthrough. CIG and the DNRP rolled up their sleeves and set to work.

On October 27, 2005, nearly 700 people15 piled into Seattle’s Qwest Field Conference Center to attend the conference, “The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be,” a name borrowed from quipster Yogi Berra.16

The Projections. Even Sims and his staff were taken aback at the magnitude of the shifts that the CIG scientists identified as likely for Washington State over the next 50 years. King County was diverse geologically, with the large marine estuary of Puget Sound to the west, the Cascade Mountains to the east, plentiful rain along the coast, and numerous lakes dotting the landscape. It was also crisscrossed, at varied elevations, by several major river watersheds. CIG’s best projections indicated that change was coming to temperature and precipitation patterns in the area, and to the nature of the water resources, including their source (rain versus snow), behavior, and temperature.

Initially, County planners had hoped to attract between 200 and 300 participants, but the early response was so great, the County shifted the event to a larger venue. Even so, some people were turned away at the door to keep the crowd within fire code limits.

Most clearly—and consistent with patterns across the globe—mountain snow volume was on the decline. April 1 snowpack in the Cascades had already decreased 30 percent since 1950, and scientists predicted an overall 50 percent reduction in snowpack between 1950 and 2050. Because local water reservoirs and some local rivers were fed by this melting snow, this was a significant development. In fact—counterintuitive in this watery realm—drought conditions had become increasingly common in King County during the previous 20 years. At the same time, torrential rains had become more frequent. Between 1990 and 2005, river flooding in King County had been declared a federal emergency on seven occasions. Whether these developments were the start of a lasting trend or a function of routine climate variability was still uncertain, but some climate scientists believed the increased incidence of flooding and drought was likely to continue.

Overall, the likeliest consequence of these shifting temperature and precipitation patterns was increased drought in late summer and increased river flooding in fall and winter. Combined with the anticipated population growth in the State and, in particular, in the Puget Sound region, seasonal water shortages might be expected to set up competitive tensions among current water users—residents, hydropower utilities, farms, forests, and fish. Several species of wild salmon, already listed “endangered” under federal law, were expected to suffer from the anticipated rise in

15 About 60 percent of attendees were from government agencies and the rest were evenly divided among nonprofits,

businesses, and “others.” 16 Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra, born in 1925, was a Major League Baseball player and manager. Many quirky,

paradoxical quotations have been attributed to Berra (some, perhaps, erroneously, given that Berra is also said to have remarked, "I didn't really say everything I said.") The idea of using the Berra quote as the conference title came from a member of the CIG team, hydrologist and engineer Rick Palmer. D o

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river water temperatures, decreased summer river flows, and increased flooding (most damaging to salmon eggs).17

In addition, CIG scientists projected that, by 2100, the state would see a sea level rise of one to three feet,

What Next?

with some areas affected more than others. Sea level rise in south Puget Sound, for example, was expected to be higher than other regions of the state due to suspected land subsidence, or sinking, in that area. The State was also expected to see greater storm surges as a result of higher mean sea levels.

As its organizers had hoped, the daylong conference generated a buzz locally. “I think it was a real turning point for the people who attended,” says CIG Outreach Specialist Lara Whitely Binder. Afterward, Sims’ executive staff began brainstorming about how to build on the momentum. “The week after the conference, the office was percolating with ideas about the next step,” recalls Jim Lopez, Sims’ deputy chief of staff, who was charged with coordinating the County’s climate change initiatives.

What do you do? Do you make an interactive Web environment, where folks can take all this energy and we can have an exchange of ideas? Do we create a comprehensive report [reprising information from the conference] and get it up on the Web as soon as possible? Do we perhaps plan to have future conferences?

He and his colleagues also began to ask themselves, “What is the next operational step for King County? How are we going to now embed [adaptation] in our plans? How are we going to make it meaningful for all the 13,000-plus employees of the County?”

Changes on the Margin. One thing Sims’ executive team quickly concluded was that for the most part, addressing climate change adaptation operationally within King County did not require an entirely new and expensive set of initiatives. Rather, it was “another factor on the margin that you’ve got to think about” to make smart choices about money that was being spent anyway, says Triplett. For instance, when replacing storm drainage pipes, it might be prudent to choose larger pipes in anticipation of a larger volume of water. Or, when repairing roads located near rivers, it might make sense to use permeable pavement. Or, when locating a solid waste facility, it might be 17 In addition, the combination of drought and flooding put contradictory pressures on reservoir managers. If they

kept reservoir levels too low, they risked drought. If they kept reservoir levels too high, they risked having to release water into flooding rivers in the midst of a torrential rain storm, adding to downstream flood damage.

18 Three years later, a CIG paper would project a sea level rise in the Puget Sound area of between 3 and 22 inches by 2050 (with a medium estimate of 6 inches) and between 6 and 50 inches by 2100 (with a medium estimate of 13 inches). While some environmentalists argued that rapid melting of polar ice sheets might generate a catastrophic sea level rise of 20 feet worldwide by 2100, the CIG scientists did not believe it possible for a rise of that magnitude to occur in this timeframe. D o

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best not to choose an island that might be underwater in 20 years, or 30, or 40. “Ultimately, for local government, climate change is about infrastructure—what is it, where is it, what kind is it?” says Triplett. “So you use climate to make sure you don’t make bad decisions.”

A case like the Brightwater plant, with its $28 million outlay for reclaimed water conveyance, was a more sizeable commitment, however. And, in the fall of 2005, Sims had to decide whether to put his political capital behind a recommendation from the DNRP for a tenfold increase in its flood prevention program over a period of 10 years. Over the life of the program, that would amount to an increase of $270 million over the existing funding level.

Weighing a 10-fold Budget Increase in Flood Prevention

King County’s climate change conference occurred just two months after Hurricane Katrina breached a levee in New Orleans, to catastrophic effect, in August 2005. At the time, DNRP’s Water and Land Resources Division was in the midst of updating its 1993 flood prevention and management plan. Experts in the division had long warned that many of the County’s 500 levees and revetments19

In updating the plan, the DNRP wanted to try again for increased funding and the department saw in Katrina a potential opening to make the case for their new 10-year plan, which proposed an increase in flood prevention funding from $3 million to $30 million per year. None of the King County levees protected a dense urban residential area, as in New Orleans, but several crucial levees did protect a 25,000 acre industrialized flood plain that contained a $7 billion mix of manufacturers, warehouses, truck distribution centers, utilities, high tech server farms, nearly half of the state’s aerospace industry (including a major Boeing 737 plant in Renton), and a number of important regional roads.

were in terrible condition and no longer reliable. The 1993 flood plan had, in fact, called for major capital repairs to many of these levees, but in the subsequent 12 years, the Division had received funding to complete only a tiny fraction of these.

After the Katrina disaster, the DNRP quickly completed its new plan and presented it to Sims. At the time, the local share of the county flood program was funded by a small amount of general tax revenue and one localized flood district that generated enough revenue to complete about one repair project per year. There were 11 other rural flood drainage districts that no longer collected revenues and existed in name only. These revenue sources fell far short of being able to deliver the funding level DNRP now believed necessary, so the department proposed that the County dissolve these small districts and create, in their stead, a single countywide flood district. This would dramatically expand the property tax base for the flood levy. Most notably, it would

19 A levee was a ridge designed to confine river flow and prevent flooding. A revetment was the facing on an

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add the County’s two largest cities, Seattle and Bellevue, into the funding base; together, the two accounted for almost 40 percent of the assessed property value in King County.

To persuade the King County Council to create a countywide flood district and approve a 1000 percent increase in the flood budget would entail not one but several votes of the Council, spaced out over a period of two years or more. The budget vote would come at the tail end of the process, and by that time, other concerns might have supplanted the current alarm provoked by Katrina. What’s more, not all of King County was vulnerable to river flooding. Of the nine geographic districts in the county—each represented by one councilmember—only three were at risk of river flooding. And two of those three were represented by Republicans who generally opposed new taxes. Seattle and Bellevue, on the other hand, were at no risk of river flooding and— though generally less tax averse than the rural areas—were unlikely to support a plan that taxed their residents but gave them no direct benefit.

For about half the cost, the County could repair the worst of the levees, but would have to set aside other worthy projects, including ecological initiatives to preserve natural watershed habitat and endangered salmon. Where possible, the County was trying to buy out strategically- located riverside properties in order to remove or set back levees, and allow the river to occupy more of its natural flood plain. This approach was not possible in the industrialized flood plain, but was do-able in rural residential watersheds. The setback levees were cheaper to maintain than traditional levees, as they were under less pressure. The strategy was also far better for riverside habitat and fish—especially salmon, which could be killed off by fast-moving flood waters, but had a good chance of surviving if the waters were allowed to spread out and slow down. The lower funding level would also limit the County’s ability to invest in relatively low cost flood prevention projects in agricultural areas—elevating homes on stilts and creating mounds of higher ground where farmers could safeguard their livestock and equipment during a flood.

Other Ideas for Moving the Adaptation Initiative Forward

In addition to deciding what to do about the flood prevention proposal, Sims and his executive team would consider investing County time, effort and revenue in several other initiatives, each of which might—in ways large or small—help to prepare King County for a shifting climate, or advance the cause of climate adaptation, more generally. Among the projects to receive consideration:

Option 1: Developing a Guidebook on Climate Adaptation

One project idea, which came under consideration almost immediately after the October 2005 conference, was whether King County and the CIG group should capitalize on insights gained through the conference by developing a “guidebook” for local, regional, and state governments about how to approach, and prepare for, local climate change impacts. Such a project was in line D o

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with Sims’ wish to play a leadership role on climate change, and CIG’s mandate to advise the public sector.

Option 2: Forging a Public Alliance with the Marshall Islands

Sims and his executive team also weighed the idea of forging a public alliance with the Marshall Islands, thought to be in danger of submersion—sooner rather than later—due to global warming and rising sea level. The Micronesian nation of 60,000 is located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just north of the equator and just west of the international dateline. Its five primary islands and 29 “atolls” (an island of coral that surrounds a lagoon, partially or completely) are spread out across 700,000 square miles of ocean. On average, the Marshall Islands stood just seven feet above sea level, and were thus thought to be at grave risk of inundation. The President of the Marshall Islands, Kessai Note, elected by his Parliament in 2000, had devoted much energy to traveling the world, sounding the alarm about the fate of his island nation, and declaring that without global assistance, the Marshall Islands might well be obliterated, making its residents the world’s first “environmental refugees.” Because many Pacific Islanders already resided in King County, it was likely that—if forced from home—many of these refugees would come to the County.

Sims and Lopez saw in the Marshall Islands predicament a way to dramatize the destructive power of climate change and underscore the urgent need for action—both mitigation and adaptation. By pledging to assist the nation, perhaps through a combination of advocacy and technical assistance, Sims might highlight the need to take action on global warming and showcase his own leadership on the issue.

Option 3: Creating a County ‘Climate Plan’

Another idea that emerged in the months that followed the conference was the creation of an interdepartmental “climate plan,” that would cast the County’s 15-year history of environmental initiatives in the light of climate change, and identify further mitigation and adaptation initiatives.

In general, the County had made planning work the centerpiece of its management strategy. To proponents of the idea, the new plan would create a vehicle to focus the attention of busy County managers on climate change, so as to incorporate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the consideration of climate trends into department-level planning and operations. To an outside audience, its mere existence would signal King County’s commitment to the climate change issue, and in its particulars, it would serve as a useful summary of King County’s history, approach, and plan of action.

The project would also demand a significant investment of staff time from several busy County departments or divisions, including Natural Resources and Parks, Transportation, Public D o

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Health, Development and Environmental Services, Facilities Management, and Emergency Management.

Option 4: Seizing a Political Moment with a New Set of Climate Commitments

On March 23-24, 2006, Seattle was slated to host a string of global warming events under the title, “A Climate of Change.” The highlight would be a presentation by former Vice President Al Gore, whose film about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, had just premiered a few weeks previous at the 2006 Sundance Festival. Gore had also agreed to attend a press conference organized by Mayor Nickels where the Mayor would announce that 219 cities had so far signed his US Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging to meet or beat the greenhouse gas reduction target in the Kyoto Protocol. Nickels would also release his “green ribbon” report, describing how Seattle proposed to meet this target.

The event promised to attract a number of environmental leaders to Seattle. Sims proposed that King County take advantage of the opportunity to release a set of “executive orders” that would summarize the County’s mitigation efforts to date and announce a set of bold new commitments:

• Ratcheting up the proportion of bio-diesel in the fuel mix used in the County’s diesel vehicles (including county buses) from 5 to 20 percent.

• Acquiring 100,000 new acres of forestland by 2010.

• Deriving 50 percent of nontransit energy from renewable energy sources by 2012.

• Deriving 35 percent of transit energy from efficiencies and renewable energy by 2015.

• Deriving 50 percent of transit energy from efficiencies and renewable energy by 2020.

This proposal set off a furor within King County government, for two primary reasons. One, some staff members worried that the announcement would look like a grandstand move, an effort to upstage Nickels at Nickels’ own event. Second, staff argued that the rush to announce the new commitments did not give King County departments sufficient time to review the particulars. Some transit officials, for example, were concerned that a 20 percent bio-diesel mix was simply unworkable—that it would clog up bus engines; at the least, they argued, this concern should be investigated before the County went public with such a commitment.

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Exhibit 120

20 Source: King County Department of Development and Environmental Services. D o

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Exhibit 221

21 Source: http://www.metrokc.gov/kcmap.htm. D o

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The Challenge of Adapting to Climate Change:
King County Brings Local Action to a Global Threat
Introduction
A Personal Crossroads
A Lively Debate
‘The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be’
What Next?