NBIS Launches Salmon-Safe Business and Urban Campus Initiative

NBIS is joining with Salmon-Safe to engage Washington businesses, institutions and urban land owners in practices that can help preserve the health of our waterways and Puget Sound. When you adopt Salmon-Safe best practices for storm water runoff and landscape management, you join a broad coalition of communities, farms, businesses, and institutions working to restore health to our salmon streams, drinking and recreation waters and marine environments.

Salmon-Safe is an innovative program that provides science-based third party certification of management policies & field practices, backed by site inspections by an independent certification team with peer reviewed standards.

Salmon Safe has developed certification standards for farms and agricultural land, parks and municipal land, and now urban corporate and institutional land management. More than 30,000 acres in critical Northwest agricultural watersheds of Oregon, California, Washington have been certified.

The urban program has made significant progress with certification of Portland Parks and major corporate land-owners, including:

• Nike, Inc. World Headquarters in Beaverton
• Portland State University
• Kettle Foods
• Toyota at the Port of Portland
• Others in process and soon to be announced

Salmon Safe provides public recognition for the companies, institutions, farms, vineyards, and municipalities that participate through public service advertising, signs and banners.

The NBIS Business and Urban Campus Initiative
Through NBIS and Salmon-Safe, companies and institutions are finding new strategies for addressing urgent regional goals -- conserving water, protecting salmon and stream habitat, and reducing pollutants entering the watersheds of Puget Sound.

Benefits include:

• Public recognition as an environmental leader
• Salmon-Safe signage and participation in public service advertising and recognition campaigns
• Cost and risk reductions
• Independent validation of environmental performance
• Brand enhancement
• System-wide evaluation and recommendations for landscape and water management practices
• LEED Innovation credit

Certification Process
The Salmon-Safe Certification is a three-step Process:

1. Application and Certification Agreement
   Applicant provides brief information about their operation and related project contact information and commits to the program inspection process and fees, regardless of certification decision outcome.
   
2. Assessment by Certification Team
   System-wide Assessment –Applicant presents to the team an overview of management practices, as detailed in the Certification Standards.
   Site Visits –Certification team conducts official visits to verify implementation of practices at sites.
   
3. Certification
   Endorsement Contract – Applicants confirm a contract with Salmon-Safe regarding the use of the Salmon-Safe logo.

Annual verification – An overview of system-wide performance focusing on any significant changes to management practices, as well as verification of satisfactory progress towards meeting any outstanding conditions for certification.

Recertification – Recertification, including system-wide reassessment and site verification visits, occurs every five years based upon a new certification agreement and payment of program fees.

(photos are from the Washington Fish and Wildlife Department’s website: http://wdfw.wa.gov/wildwatch/salmoncam/hatchery.html)