Drafter
Clerk 03/01/2012
Title
A MOTION supporting efforts of the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust to gain designation as a National Heritage Area and urging Congress to approve such designation.
Body
WHEREAS, in 1990, the Issaquah Alps Trails Club led a citizens march from Snoqualmie Pass to the Seattle waterfront to dramatize the need for a greenway plan, and
WHEREAS, in 1991, the nonprofit Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust was formed, still governed to this day by a sixty-member board of directors representing a diversity of conservation, development, businesses and local, state and federal interests, with the goal of creating a one-hundred-mile-long Greenway along Interstate 90 from the Seattle waterfront and across the Cascades, and
WHEREAS, in 1998, Federal Highway Administration designated the Mountains to Sound Greenway as a National Scenic Byway, wherein certain roads receive recognition from the U.S. Department of Transportation based on archaeological, cultural, historic, natural, recreational and scenic qualities, and
WHEREAS, today within its 1.5 million acres, more than nine hundred thousand acres of land are publicly owned, from city parks to expansive public forests, more than one hundred thousand acres are conserved as permanent forests and farms in private ownership, there are over one thousand six hundred miles of recreational trails, twenty-eight cities and 1.8 million people, and
WHEREAS, the greenway is often heralded as a national model for conservation and land use, showcasing successful efforts weaving together the urban and the wild landscapes of the 1.5 million acres surrounding Interstate 90, including the fifteenth-largest metropolis in the United States, and
WHEREAS, the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust has been uniquely successful in acting as a shepherd for the greenway and that it has the capacity and the support needed to be the local coordinating entity for the Mountains to Sound Greenway National Heritage Area, and
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