High-quality produce springing from the fertile soils of the Skagit Delta has always come with an environmental cost: 60,000 acres of Skagit County’s agricultural lands are farmable only because of a complex network of dikes and drains separating the ground from saltwater.
Those barriers have long been in the crosshairs of those seeking to save salmon, which rely on the intermingling of fresh and salt waters within the Skagit River estuary to survive. It’s a dynamic that has traditionally pitted tribes and conservationists against local government and farmers at the river’s mouth.
Some observers, including Skagit County Prosecutor Will Honea, say the history has been exploited by Seattle City Light around a regulatory process far upstream: The federal relicensing of its dams on the upper Skagit River.
“All Seattle has to do is keep the locals and the tribes fighting,” Honea said. “The longer we fight, and the longer we argue … the longer nothing happens.”
City Light, the public utility department of the City of Seattle, is going through a complicated, federal relicensing of the Skagit River Hydroelectric Project, a series of three dams on the upper Skagit River that generates 20% of its electricity. Construction on the first of the three dams began in 1921. The current license for all the dams, issued in 1995, regulates the project’s operations and includes measures to protect fisheries and other public resources. It expires in 2025.
The project not only is required to provide safe, reliable hydropower, it must also factor in flood control, and recreation — and mitigate impacts on fish and wildlife. It must also respect tribal treaty rights and be in compliance with the federal Clean Water and Endangered Species acts.
An ongoing negotiation to reach these goals puts all pieces of river management, including its estuary in Skagit County, far downstream of the dams, on the table as part of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) process.
This includes managing billions of dollars of infrastructure owned by the Skagit County dike and drainage districts, which operate about 100 tidegates. The gates drain excess water from Skagit fields when they are open and block the incoming tide when closed.
“It’s important for us to get it right, because we’re getting it right for the next generation,” said Will Stelle, a former regional administrator of the West Coast Region of National Marine Fisheries Service and a former director of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center.
A new dam license will typically be for 30-50 years due to the heavy investment required and the need for a predictable revenue stream to recoup investments. It’s a long, drawn-out process that legally requires public feedback and comment before any plan is approved.
However, much of the planning has been clouded by a veil of secrecy due to non-disclosure agreements. For months City Light worked behind closed doors with tribes, and state and federal governments at what was known as the “comprehensive” table, while other stakeholders, such as the county, had limited access to the ideas being discussed.
Earlier this year, Skagit County leaders voiced fears that the future of the river system was being negotiated without them, inhibiting their ability to balance the management of agricultural land and respecting tribes’ wishes while also planning for the impacts of climate change.
Some negotiators at the time downplayed those concerns.
“Skagit County’s fears of us focusing only on habitat restoration that will negatively impact the agricultural community are unfounded,” Chris Townsend, the director of natural resources and hydro licensing division for City Light, said in March.
It wasn’t until this summer, after a series of frustrated emails and complaints, that local governments and other stakeholders were able to fight their way to a seat at the table. In the process, they, too, signed non-disclosure agreements.
City Light told CDN that the nondisclosure agreements are necessary because they allow participants to “put things on the table” and spitball creative ideas without being afraid of them being leaked to the media.
Those ideas will influence the “ecosystem approach” the utility says it is taking to relicensing. This means City Light will consider its impacts in the area immediately surrounding the dams, as well as how its presence in the watershed affects the entire environment.
It’s an essential way to approach a complex problem, Stelle said, because how and when City Light releases water from its dam impacts the ecology of the river and estuary.
“The flowing water is the lifeblood of the system,” Stelle said. “So the operations [of the dams] and the investments in habitat end up having to fit together.”
The way City Light manages its project not only provides cheap power to Seattle, but impacts the survival of salmon.
Restoring salmon populations
Two primary strategies are in play for salmon recovery efforts on the Skagit River: fish passages to allow salmon access to waterways upstream of dams, and estuary habitat to provide a safe place for juvenile salmon to grow.
Nearly everyone interviewed by CDN agreed that there is a need to pursue both strategies. The major questions that remain are who is in charge of what and how should City Light’s environmental mitigation dollars be split between the approaches.
Honea has long argued that City Light is uniquely situated to fund and install fish passages in its dams, while local government and treaty tribes should be in the driver’s seat for the planning and execution of habitat rehabilitation in the delta.
Outside of the relicensing process, the Skagit Board of Commissioners is meeting with Skagit Treaty Tribes and other local government bodies to develop a transparent, long-range plan that supports both salmon and agriculture in the Skagit/Samish Delta, while preparing for the impacts of climate change and sea level rise.
That mediation, which seeks to resolve tension between the parties, is “quickly evolving into positive on-the-ground outcomes,” Honea said.
While the percentage of farmland that could be threatened by fish habitat restoration is unknown, the 2005 Skagit Chinook Recovery plan identified 2,700 acres for restoration, Jenna Friebel, the executive director of the Dike and Drainage Districts Consortium, told CDN in March.
Of these, several hundred acres have been restored to functioning estuary habitat, though more is needed to reach the goal of securing space for 1.3 million additional chinook smolts, said Chase Gunnell, a public information officer for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
“Loss of naturally functioning estuary habitat over the past century has been particularly harmful for juvenile salmon, especially wild chinook,” Gunnell said. “To recover this iconic species, we need to restore more of our region’s estuaries.”
In 1999 the Puget Sound chinook salmon was first listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The 2020 State of the Salmon report categorized the species as “in crisis” due to the gap between the number of spawning fish and recovery goals.
“There are areas that are more beneficial to salmon than others and that’s where we want to focus restoration efforts,” Gunnell said.
Restoration is usually done by moving dikes and drainage infrastructure to let tides and rivers back into areas that were historically estuary habitat.
But that requires local government consent, as the dike and drainage districts, as well as the county, are ultimately legally responsible for the vast majority of the delta’s infrastructure.
“The buck stops with the county and district commissioners,” Skagit County Commissioner Ron Wesen said of the issue in a May meeting.
But that has not stopped City Light from factoring the habitat restoration and fish passages into its plans, Townsend said.
“Federal, state and tribal governments have concluded that fish passage at Seattle’s dams is an effective mechanism to restore salmon runs to harvestable levels,” Jack Fiander, general counsel for the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe, wrote to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Oct. 29.
Skagit County, and local farmers, support the push for fish passages. They worry, however, that their regulatory efforts to preserve agriculture in the region by dissolving development rights on thousands of acres of farmland through local zoning has inadvertently attracted City Light and others looking for cheap land use for their. ways to hit environmental mitigation goals.
The utility company found its credibility undermined in July after an investigation by The Margin/The Nation reported that City Light appears to have “misrepresented the environmental impacts of its dams” and “has failed to adequately address those impacts” for more than a century, specifically regarding fish passage.
Saving a complex web of agriculture
Standing at the edge of a narrow drainage canal and a sprawling field of Brussels sprouts, dike commissioner Jason Vander Kooy, a second-generation dairyman in Skagit County, explained that much of the delta farmland was too elevated to be of any consistent use as salmon habitat.
Yet, he worries that City Light and corporations might attempt to offset their environmental responsibilities by converting productive farmland to failed estuaries.
“I don’t support City Light coming into the delta with deep pockets and just gobbling up farmland converting it to estuary — or supposed estuary,” Vander Kooy said. “For some reason [there] is this notion that the only way salmon recover is we give up farmland. And, that’s just simply not true.”
The Skagit County agriculture community is an interconnected web of relationships and farming leases due to the complex nature of crop rotations, in which crops are planted in different fields on a set schedule so as not to deplete the soil quality of one parcel.
“Restoration of farmland has a ripple effect beyond just the parcel restored because it impacts the amount of land available for crop rotations — which is a critical part of the overall agricultural practices in the Skagit Delta,” Friebel said.
On alternative crop years, dairymen, such as Vander Kooy, are able to trade fields with neighbors and plant filler crops and pump gallons of nutrient-dense manure from their cows onto the plot as part of the rotation.
Friebel explained in March, before signing a non-disclosure agreement, that City Light’s habitat restoration efforts could threaten additional hundreds or even thousands of acres of Skagit farmland.
The Skagit Board of Commissioners banned Wetland Mitigation Banking in 2009, expanding that ban in 2022 to prohibit offsite compensatory mitigation. Wetland mitigation banking allows companies and others to offset their development impacts on wetlands at one location by developing or restoring wetlands in another area.
“We don’t have enough farmland to become a mitigation bank for nonagricultural development around the larger Puget Sound region,” commissioner Wesen said in the May meeting.
Preventing wetland banking in the county, however, does not allow the county to side-step legal requirements for protecting salmon runs.
Recent Skagit County leaders know they must balance preserving farmland with the responsibility of supporting treaty tribes’ rights — seeing them as partners in defending the region from outside, corporate influence, such as City Light.
“There are certain things that can be done at the estuary that will help fish, but they’ve got to be done in a way that improves infrastructure, deals with sea level rise, looks to our intention to preserve farmland, is actually high value for salmon,” Honea said.
While discussions are ongoing behind closed doors, there will be a robust public comment period at some point, explained Stelle. This means any agreements made between City Light and other stakeholders aren’t final.
Isaac Stone Simonelli is CDN’s enterprise/investigations reporter; reach him at isaacsimonelli@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 127.
