King County helps fund Vashon Island oyster restoration projects

2005 Archived News

Representatives from NOAA, marine habitat experts, King County, elected representatives and local residents are celebrating the first native oyster planting on Vashon Island, tomorrow, Friday, August 19 at 9 a.m.

The King County-funded project is the first of its kind to hit the shorelines of Vashon Island and is considered one of the crucial actions needed to help protect and restore near shore waterways and critical habitat.

"Olympia Oysters are an important ecological resource and the assistance of federal, state and local entities is critical to our ability to restore these oysters back to their historic habitats located in Quartermaster Harbor, " said Mark Isaacson, Director of the King County Water and Land Resources Division.

Approximately 340,000 native oysters will be seeded on approximately three acres of tidelands throughout three island sites to improve water quality and enhance habitat and prey resources for juvenile salmon.

"The Vashon project is part of a Sound-wide project to reestablish Olympic Oysters on historic ground. To date, we have planted over 5 million oysters at 80 sites, spanning private, public and tribal tidelands, " said Betsy Peabody, Executive Director, Puget Sound Restoration Fund. "For commercial shellfish farmers, this oyster is an icon of the industry; it's the oyster on which Washington's shellfish industry was founded back in the 1850s."

This revitalization project was funded, in part, by the Community Salmon Fund, a partnership between King County and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF). The county contributed $4,410 toward the project, which is matched by federal funds. The funding was directed to the Restoration Fund, which oversaw and distributed the funds to facilitate the oyster seeding and recovery efforts in Quartermaster Harbor.

The Native Oyster Restoration Project is one of 30 projects from around the country selected to be profiled at the upcoming White House Conference on Cooperative Conservation on August 29, 2005.

The Puget Sound Restoration Fund has spearheaded a broad-based effort to rebuild populations of the Olympic oyster in Washington State and enhance a marine species all but decimated earlier in the century by pollution, habitat loss and over harvest. For more information about this organization, please visit www.restorationfund.org.

Since its inception in 2002, the King County Community Salmon Fund has provided funding towards 32 habitat restoration and outreach projects, contributing over $826,401. For more information about the Community Salmon Fund, contact Ken Pritchard at King County at 206-296-8265, e-mail ken.pritchard@kingcounty.gov