Daniel Jack Chasan has the story over at Crosscut:
The legislative session wasn’t generous to the environment, especially Puget Sound. But there was one victory of ‘dumb doggedness’: the rescue tug at Neah Bay, a key to fighting oil spills.
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There’s plenty to argue about, but virtually everyone seems glad that the Legislature has finally come up with permanent funding for a rescue tug at Neah Bay. The rescue tug law is landmark legislation, although looking at the long-term needs of Puget Sound, authorizing a tugboat is kind of like putting a sprinkler system into a house with a crumbling foundation. If a fire breaks out, you’ll be glad you have it, but it won’t stop the slow process of deterioration. Still, that tug is arguably the environmental highlight of the session. On its web site, People for Puget Sound hails a “Victory on Permanent Rescue Tug at Neah Bay.” The “progressive” political group Fuse has given the 2009 legislature a D on its environmental performance but an A on the rescue tug legislation.
There’s nothing new about the tug itself; the novelty is assured funding. A rescue vessel has been stationed at Neah Bay for the past decade. But it has always had a hand-to-mouth existence. In 1999, Congressman Norm Dicks got the Navy to pay for its first year. Then, the next year, the Makah tribe used money awarded as damages in the Tenyo Maru spill — when a Japanese fish processor hit in the fog by a Chinese freighter spilled 100,000 gallons of fuel — to help the state fund it for another year. (The Justice Department had to approve using Tenyo Maru damages for prevention, rather than restoration. Environmental actvist Fred Felleman, who has worked extensively with the Makahs, likes to call the concept “prestoration.”) The state has paid ever since, but funding has been year-to-year, and, until this year, only enough to keep a tug there over the winter. Felleman describes the funding effort as a long series of bake sales.
