Governor Ferguson appoints Mindy Roberts to serve as Puget Sound Partnership Executive Director

OLYMPIA - Today Governor Bob Ferguson announced the appointment of Mindy Roberts as executive director of Puget Sound Partnership. She started her new position today.

Puget Sound Partnership is the state agency that leads the region's collective effort to restore and protect Puget Sound. The Partnership works with hundreds of tribal, federal, state and local partners on actions that advance recovery based on science.

Prior to joining Puget Sound Partnership, Roberts served as the Puget Sound program director at Washington Conservation Action, an environmental nonprofit, for 10 years, leading a team focused on ecosystem recovery through the lens of tribal sovereignty and environmental justice. Through collaboration, she and her team helped advance environmental policies at the state, federal and local levels; strengthen clean water regulations; and protect and restore healthy habitat for salmon, orcas and the people that depend on them.

"Mindy Roberts has devoted her entire career to protecting the environment," Governor Ferguson said. "Her expertise and passion will serve Puget Sound and the Partnership well, and I am confident in her ability to provide strong and steady leadership as executive director."

"I am thrilled that Governor Ferguson appointed me to lead the Partnership," Roberts said. "Puget Sound and the Salish Sea have supported people for thousands of years, and our decisions today will shape what future generations experience."

"Mindy Roberts has been a tireless advocate for the Puget Sound, for orca and salmon, for coastal communities and Tribal resources, for free-flowing rivers and water quality statewide," said Alyssa Macy, CEO of Washington Conservation Action. "She is a champion for laws and policies that protect people and nature. We are grateful for Mindy's leadership and the impact she has made. We look forward to collaborating with Mindy in her new role."

"I am very pleased to hear that Mindy Roberts was selected to lead the Puget Sound Partnership," said Justin Parker, Executive Director of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission and former board member of Washington Conservation Action. "Mindy brings with her decades of knowledge about the complex issues important to our work to recover and protect the Puget Sound. Thanks to her scientific background, she has a deep understanding of technical details, and she also has demonstrated strength in building collaborative efforts to effect policy changes. It is imperative that the Partnership has someone in a leadership role who understands tribal treaty rights and Mindy knows that strong working relationships with tribes are needed to protect the resources that depend on a healthy Puget Sound."

Before joining Washington Conservation Action, Roberts served 16 years as an environmental engineer at the Washington State Department of Ecology. She helped develop the original Marine Water Quality Vital Sign adopted by the Partnership and led Ecology's Salish Sea modeling efforts to understand how sewage and toxic pollution impact people and natural resources.

She also served as affiliate faculty at the University of Washington Tacoma from 2008 to 2023 where she developed and taught an undergraduate field course on stream ecology.

In her spare time, Roberts enjoys crabbing, clamming, foraging mushrooms and wild foods, hiking, kayaking, climbing and traveling.

She earned three engineering degrees, including a bachelor's from the University of California, Berkeley, master's from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Ph.D. from the University of Washington.