Overview

By the late 1950s, the water quality of Lake Washington, the Duwamish River, Lake Union and Elliott Bay had become noticeably polluted, and a political consensus formed to rectify water quality issues in the Puget Sound Region. The municipal bond lawyer James Reed Ellis (1921-2019) played a key role in the establishment of a municipal authority charged with cleaning the waters of Puget Sound. In 1958, Ellis and his allies formed the Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle (Metro) to study and improve the situation. As a result, in 1962, Metro began the construction of a very large wasterwater treatment plant at West Point, a spit of land located at the west end of Fort Lawton, a US Army based established in 1900. This huge facilty in what is now Discovery Park in Seattle's Magnolia neighborhood would become the largest wastewater treatment facility in WA State.

PCAD id: 25553