Newhouse, Colleagues Blast Inslee on GAO Puget Sound Salmon Report

Today, Reps. Dan Newhouse (WA-04), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA-05), and Cliff Bentz (OR-02) released the following statement after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report that cites poor water quality as the key factor in the declining salmon populations in the Puget Sound:

“It doesn’t require an advanced degree to understand that years of dumping raw sewage and pollution into the Puget Sound would decimate salmon populations. That simple fact is now indisputable with this GAO report, which exposes what we’ve known to be true all along: Governor Inslee and the Washington Department of Ecology are responsible for killing Puget Sound salmon and must be held accountable for their negligence.”

“For the last decade, this administration has been so distracted by misguided efforts to breach the Lower Snake River dams that they completely ignored the salmon being poisoned in their own backyard. Their consistent failure to meet water quality assessment deadlines – while turning a blind eye to ongoing pollution – not only violated federal law, but it also suffocated the salmon most critical to the health and sustainability of Puget Sound Orcas. Hypocritical and politically motivated does not even begin to describe this blatant dereliction of duty.”

The new report found that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Washington State Department of Ecology violated The Clean Water Act by missing deadlines, by several years, for action plans on bodies of water that do not meet quality standards.

The report also cites that missing these deadlines hampers authorities’ work to improve water quality, and that the EPA and Department of Ecology have still not developed a written plan to prevent further missed deadlines.

View the GAO report here.

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