By Ben Tindall – Executive Director, Save Family Farming
Seattle City Light—the publicly funded utility meant to serve the people of Seattle—has made one thing painfully clear: they don’t see Skagit farmers as partners in stewardship—they see them as subjects.
In its latest relicensing proposal for the Skagit Hydroelectric Project, Seattle City Light included a long-overdue commitment to fish passage—something that both farmers and tribes have supported for years. The agricultural community initially welcomed this step, hopeful that it signaled a genuine willingness to listen and collaborate.
But behind that thin veil of collaboration lies something far more sinister.
Seattle City Light is charging ahead with a secretive, self-serving settlement that gives them the authority to condemn and seize over 1,300 acres of fertile Skagit County farmland. Not in Seattle. Not even close. This land is 80 miles away, in a completely different county—in communities City Light has refused to consult. Communities they don’t serve. Communities they clearly don’t respect.
What’s the justification for this political land grab? There isn’t one. No meaningful connection to the Skagit Project. No alignment with the 2005 Chinook Recovery Plan. Just a vague insistence that they want the authority—because they think they can get away with it.
Through this proposed settlement, Seattle City Light is behaving more like a state-sponsored cartel than a public utility. Seattle’s political elite are acting less like public servants and more like feudal lords, scheming to dictate what happens to land they don’t live on, don’t work, and don’t understand. From their perch in the Emerald City, they’re drawing lines on maps and issuing orders as if Skagit County were some distant outpost of their dominion.
Are we really at the point where a city bureaucracy gets to decide the fate of a rural community it refuses to even consult? Is this what the Seattle City Council envisions—an independent farming community reduced to caretakers of land that Seattle lawyers claim as their own?
Seattle City Light’s plan is clear: seize rural farmland and greenwash it with vague promises of salmon recovery—recovery that stakeholders in the local community weren’t even consulted about. No farmers. No drainage districts. No accountability. Just bureaucrats deciding what to take and who to ignore.
They’ve cloaked themselves in the language of environmental restoration while scheming to plunder land that doesn’t belong to them, to benefit interests they won’t even name, all while hiding behind the façade of public service. Seattle City Light’s proposed settlement for the relicensing of its Skagit Project is not about salmon. It’s about power. Raw, unapologetic power.
And no—we’re not talking about hydroelectricity. We’re talking about the kind of power that comes from arrogance. The arrogance to believe that the political elite in Seattle know better than the people who actually live, work, and farm in Skagit County. This is power fueled by a thirst for control, not conservation. It’s the kind of power that shrugs off public input and local leadership because it gets in the way of the agenda. It’s power wielded like a mafia-run entity—where personal property rights mean nothing, and the only ethic is “take what you want and call it a public good.”
Seattle City Light is positioning itself not as a public utility, but as a land broker for sweetheart deals with the very entities they are politically and financially entangled with. These are backroom negotiations done behind closed doors, with outcomes crafted for the benefit of Seattle’s urban environmental industrial complex—not the recovery of salmon, and certainly not the well-being of rural families.
This isn’t stewardship. It’s exploitation, pure and simple.
Let’s be very clear: this is not aligned with the 2005 Skagit Chinook Recovery Plan. That plan emphasized strategic, locally-led restoration efforts—not political land grabs and arbitrary acreage goals drafted in the corner offices of a city that doesn’t grow the food, doesn’t manage the floods, and doesn’t bear the consequences of their ambition.
This proposal is nothing short of political manipulation, disguised as environmental stewardship. A blatant betrayal of trust and process. And it comes with devastating consequences—1,300 acres of farmland stripped from the local economy, ripped from family legacies, and turned into a pawn in Seattle’s performance politics.
And let’s not forget: they won’t even rule out using condemnation to get it. Government-sanctioned land seizure. Seattle lawyers granted the authority to take Skagit County’s land, by force if necessary, to fulfill an agenda they crafted without us, without transparency, and without consent.
Is this what salmon recovery looks like? Or is this just Seattle making rural Washington pay the price—again?
Washington agriculture demands that this settlement be fixed. Remove the threat of condemnation. Remove the arbitrary land targets. Restore the local voice to the table. Otherwise, the farming community of Skagit County—and across this state—will have no choice but to reject this entire proposal.
Seattle’s political class needs to hear us: Skagit is not your colony. Our farmers are not your tenants. And this land is not yours to take.