The essays, analyses and opinions presented as Community Voices express the perspectives of their authors on topics of interest and importance to the community, and are not intended to reflect perspectives on behalf of the Salish Current.
Commentary: Refusal to issue permits to do necessary maintenance on aging tide gates is likely to cause the structures to fail and result in saltwater flooding farmland.
After federal authorities blocked not one but two seemingly straightforward fixes to tide gates protecting Skagit County farmland, troubling questions have surfaced about the true motives behind the decision.
The National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) move to block the simple tide gate repairs could appear to be an underhanded attempt to seize thousands of acres of productive farmland from farmers and convert it into fish habitat.
Such a ploy could allow the federal agency to effectively take the farmland, while avoiding the legal requirements and landowner compensation costs of a more transparent eminent domain process.
The agency’s refusal to issue permits for local diking and drainage districts to do the necessary maintenance to the failing tide gates is likely to cause the aging structures to fail. This would cause saltwater to flood and destroy much of the farmland the tide gates have protected for more than a century in some areas.
In fact, the NMFS is essentially admitting it actually wants this disastrous outcome. By saying it’s blocking the maintenance work precisely because fixing the tide gates would prevent such farmland destruction, the agency is apparently already expecting to take the farmland this way. In its official assessments, NMFS says it’s opposed to the fixes because they would allow farmers to continue farming the land. NMFS is literally saying it prefers a scenario that allows “catastrophic failure” of the tide gates.
Why would a federal agency be so dead set on taking this farmland away from farmers, even if it meant using deceptive, unethical schemes?
Despite a growing body of evidence showing a great misdiagnosis of the problems hindering chinook salmon recovery, numerous organizations and agencies at the local, state and federal level continue to push this misdiagnosis’ faulty conclusion that creating fish habitat should be the primary focus of chinook recovery efforts.
With this erroneous view driving its decisions, it’s not a stretch to believe that the NMFS may see this Skagit tide gate situation as an enticing opportunity to seize a vast swath of farmland without having to pay for it, or even follow due process.
Meanwhile, the NMFS claims the Skagit diking and drainage districts they’ve blocked from protecting farmland have the opportunity to essentially buy their way out of the problem.
In what could appear to be an extortion scheme, the agency has offered to green-light the tide gate repairs if the local farmers and landowners in the district cough up millions of dollars to fund a fish restoration project.
The NMFS’ purported olive branch essentially creates a false choice for the districts, with its price tag potentially more than 50 times larger than the districts’ entire annual budgets, far outside the realm of possibility for them.
Is the federal government essentially gaslighting farmers who simply want to maintain their ability to grow food? Is the NMFS trying to deflect attention from its decision to destroy farmland by blaming the very farmers who are trying to protect it of somehow being the real culprit?
— By Darrin Morrison
For more: “Way cleared for repair of Skagit tide gate critical to delta protection,” Salish Current, March 15, 2024
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