Photo: Gorge Dam on the Skagit River
Seattle’s City Council voted 7-0 on April 7 to commit Seattle City Light to $979 million in salmon passage construction at three Skagit River dams that have blocked fish from 40 percent of the watershed for a century. The vote authorizes a broader $4 billion settlement with the treaty tribes of the Skagit basin; Mayor Katie Wilson has until May 12 to sign, triggering a federal filing toward a new 50-year operating license around 2030.
The passage system has a proven local precedent. On the Baker River — a Skagit tributary — Puget Sound Energy’s 2004 relicensing built trap-and-haul after the sockeye run crashed to 99 returning adults in 1985. Adults are caught below the lower dam and trucked upstream; juveniles are collected at the reservoir and trucked down. By 2025 the Baker run had reached roughly 92,000 fish, a 900-fold recovery. City Light’s settlement builds the same system at all three Skagit dams, plus $200 million for habitat restoration — split roughly evenly between mainstem and estuary work — and $350 million in direct tribal compensation. Swinomish wildlife manager Tino Villaluz called the package “a lot of glamorous numbers in there that aren’t glamorous at all” — a reminder that trap-and-haul is a managed system, not a restored river.
Gorge Dam came online in 1924 on the ancestral territory of the Upper Skagit; its waters inundated Daxʷálib, an Upper Skagit village. Ross Dam, completed in 1953, flooded what the tribe calls the Valley of the Spirits. The licenses of that era did not require fish passage or treat treaty rights as a constraint. “There’s over 100 years of the river dewatered that five generations of Upper Skagit had to endure,” said Scott Schuyler, the tribe’s policy representative. The legal ground shifted slowly: Judge George Boldt’s 1974 ruling affirmed treaty rights to half the harvestable salmon, NOAA listed Puget Sound Chinook as threatened in 1999, and in 2021 the Sauk-Suiattle filed a Rights-of-Nature suit arguing salmon had legal standing and Gorge Dam could not lawfully block their passage. Seattle settled that case by committing to fish passage at Gorge; the 2026 agreement extends the commitment to all three dams. At the April 7 hearing, Councilmember Debora Juarez said: “What public utilities did to rivers here verges on violence and obscene.”
The Skagit dams remain because their 839 megawatts of carbon-free hydropower — roughly 20 percent of Seattle’s electricity — cannot be removed without a replacement plan that does not exist. Skagit County diking districts declined to sign, citing concern that estuary funding would convert delta farmland to floodplain. The county signed only after Prosecuting Attorney Will Honea conditioned approval on City Light defunding the Skagit Environmental Endowment Commission, which he said had worked against fish passage.
Wilson’s signature triggers City Light’s FERC filing and a $10 million early-action study this spring. FERC’s environmental review is expected to run several years; passage construction follows in the 2030s. City Light customers will see roughly 0.5 percent annual rate increases from 2027 through 2032. No date has been set for the first fish above the dams. Schuyler, who as recently as 2021 had called for Gorge Dam removal, said “the satisfaction will come when we see fish returning.”
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Staff presented three approaches at a March 18 board retreat in Tacoma. Each closes roughly the full gap through a different mix of truncations and cancellations.
Approach 1 builds West Seattle to Alaska Junction and cancels the Issaquah-Kirkland Eastside extension entirely. Approach 2 — formally named “Build Issaquah, Cancel West Seattle” — cancels the West Seattle extension altogether while preserving the Eastside line. Approach 3 truncates every major project: Ballard to Seattle Center, West Seattle to a stub at Delridge, and Tacoma Dome Link to Fife rather than the Dome itself.
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Sound Transit CEO Dow Constantine told an overflow crowd at a West Seattle forum on April 1: “We will get to West Seattle.” The board has signaled it expects to mix elements from all three approaches rather than adopt any single scenario wholesale.
Seattle Councilmember Dan Strauss, whose Ballard district supported ST3 at nearly 90 percent in 2016, called the Ballard extension “the most riders of any project in Sound Transit history” and said any plan short of full Ballard service is “unacceptable.” Mayor Katie Wilson said she expects “shovels in the ground this year” on West Seattle. A Save Ballard Rail march across the Ballard Bridge is scheduled for April 19.
Sound Transit has not publicly addressed whether it can legally truncate voter-approved ST3 projects without a new ballot measure. In the agency’s own terminology, “defer” means a project is nominally retained in the program but receives no allocated funding until a new source materializes — in practice, an indefinite pause.
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Senate sponsor Sen. Jamie Pedersen described the challenge as “expected and welcomed,” saying that obtaining judicial review of the Culliton precedent was among the bill’s strategic purposes.
The Washington Supreme Court is expected to take direct review from the superior court and hear oral arguments in early 2027. Because the tax does not take effect until January 1, 2028, with first payments due in spring 2029, there is no urgency for a preliminary injunction. A superior court ruling is expected this summer.
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In a perfect world, we wouldn’t dam our rivers.
