The City Council recognizes that the body of water and its adjacent uplands known as Puget Sound (which includes those waters designated in this Title 4 as Tacoma Harbor) is an estuary consisting of approximately 2,500 square miles of inlets, bays, and channels, more than 200 islands, and in excess of 2,000 miles of shoreline which supports navigation, commerce, and other water-related economic uses and provides employment, recreational, educational, and other opportunities to the approximately 65 percent of Washington citizens residing within the 12 counties which border on Puget Sound, and it is apparent that the waters and shorelines of Puget Sound are accessible to and subject to multiple, and at times competing, uses.
The City Council further recognizes that Puget Sound and Tacoma Harbor are also significant recreational resources for the City, supporting tourism and recreational activities such as boating, swimming, water skiing, fishing, and scuba diving. Puget Sound residents own a multitude of pleasure boats, and in the summer, literally thousands of these craft cruise throughout Puget Sound. The density of both commercial and pleasure boat traffic continues to increase, as does the number of facilities necessary to serve such traffic and provide for transfer of cargo from vessels to on-shore storage or for transport overland by truck or rail. It is recognized that the increased amount of harbor traffic and the ever-increasing frequency of cargo transfers, involving at times hazardous materials, have, together with the increased number of pollution-creating activities on shore, created an increased potential for the serious impairment of the use and quality of the Puget Sound waters and a substantial detrimental risk to the safety and public health and welfare of the citizens of Tacoma.
It is declared to be the public policy of the City to assert and exercise all jurisdiction it may have to protect all aspects of its marine environment and the quality of the waters of Tacoma Harbor by all appropriate means, and to provide for local regulations to protect the public health and safety and to enhance the public enjoyment and safe use of Tacoma Harbor. The City is cognizant that the uses made of Puget Sound outside Tacoma Harbor will affect Tacoma Harbor, as do uses made of Tacoma Harbor affect other parts of Puget Sound, and the City, in recognition of the multi-jurisdictional effects, and in recognition of the State of Washington’s and the Federal government’s respective interests in the quality of the waters of Puget Sound, water uses, navigational rules, elimination of navigational hazards, and various other matters in which the City, State, and Federal government may have concurrent or joint jurisdiction, hereby proclaims a public policy of working cooperatively with the State and Federal governments in a joint effort to extinguish the sources of water quality degradation and in the enforcement of local, State, and Federal laws and regulations pertaining to or affecting the use of Tacoma Harbor and the health, safety, and welfare of the citizens of Tacoma.
It is the intent of the City, in adopting this title, to exercise its traditional local police powers to supplement State and Federal programs, and also to develop a close relationship with the State and Federal governments in the enforcement of laws affecting Tacoma Harbor, to the end that the interests of the City and the general public will best be served. It is further the policy and intent of the City, by the enactment of this Harbor Code, to preserve to itself and its citizens the civil right to abate public and private nuisances, and the City Manager is authorized, through the City Attorney, to commence such civil or criminal legal actions as may be appropriate to provide for elimination of sources of water quality degradation which affect Tacoma Harbor, whether such sources be within or outside the corporate limits of Tacoma, and to provide for the elimination of obstructions or activities which impair the navigability of Tacoma Harbor, or otherwise interfere with the normal public use thereof.
(Ord. 22868 § 1, 1983-06-07)