PORT HADLOCK — Jefferson County leaders said they would work toward keeping commercial shellfish beds open after the state Department of Health last week announced that pollution from nearby boats was threatening the Broders Seafood clam farm at the southern shores of Port Townsend Bay with closure.
“I will be contacting Health about their concerns,” said Al Scalf, county director of Community Development, adding that the county would also work with the state Department of Natural Resources, which owns the affected tidelands.
“We will try to come up with a compliance program that will keep the shellfish beds open.”
The threat covers about a third of a mile of shoreline adjacent to the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding and is within eyeshot across the water from the Port Hadlock Marina.
Mark Toy, environmental engineer with the Department of Health shellfish division, said that, as of May 26, 29 boats were moored in the bay between the marina and the Broders Seafood Co. clam beds.
Seven of the boats were moored adjacent to the clam beds.
Toy said nearby residents had witnessed recent discharges from boats that could pollute the shellfish beds.
“We’re concerned about the growing number of live-aboards and sporadic derelict vessels,” Toy said.
The Port Hadlock site is one of nine of Washington’s 101 commercial shellfish growing areas that state Health said are threatened with closure this year because of pollution.
Sixteen growing areas were listed as threatened areas in 2009 and 10 in 2010.
Jefferson County addressed a similar issue at Mystery Bay last year, where more than 70 boats were moored near both private and tribal shellfish beds.
The county worked with DNR to have the boats removed, but Scalf said there was a concern that some of those boats moved to the bay at Port Hadlock.
A problem with too many boats already existed at Port Hadlock, but Toy said the state and county chose to address that when the Mystery Bay problem was solved.
County Commissioner David Sullivan, whose district covers Port Hadlock, said the Mystery Bay stakeholders group of representatives — tribes, shellfish growers, county, DNR, state Health personnel and boaters — became a model program for the county.
“That was a community effort that worked out really well,” Sullivan said.
Toy said state Health will send a letter to DNR and Jefferson County “to decide if they will go through a similar process as Mystery Bay. It’s really up to permitting agencies.”
Each year, the state Department of Health looks at water quality data collected from shellfish harvesting areas.
In nine areas, data for this year, released this month, show that poor water quality or failure to manage potential pollution sources could result in the downgrade of the harvest area.
“We’re seeing a lower number of threatened areas, but the closure of any harvest area has a direct and sometimes catastrophic affect on individual commercial shellfish harvesters, tribes or the public,” said Bob Woolrich, growing area manager for the state Department of Health.
“We can’t afford to lose more of our valuable shellfish harvesting areas to pollution.”
The state Health Department’s Office of Shellfish and Water Protection uses national standards to classify all commercial shellfish harvesting areas in the state.
The Mystery Bay plan includes:
■ Permitting and managing future boat moorage to ensure that commercial shellfish beds do not have to be closed.
■ Removal of buoys that do not have permits from Jefferson County and are not authorized by DNR.
■ Providing a method of exempting the boats (and mooring buoys) owned by shoreline property owners toward the National Shellfish Sanitation Program threshold level for marinas — a minimum of 10 boats.
■ Manage transient boaters through a voluntary “No Anchor Zone” and developing information that directs transient boaters to dock or moor in Mystery Bay State Park.
■ Establish a long-term boat-monitoring plan to ensure that the numbers and densities of boats do not exceed the marina threshold.
■ Develop adaptive management strategies to address changes in the bay and their usage as they occur.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.