Seattle City Light Wastes A Decade's Worth of Salmon Recovery Funding
During the last decade, Washington state spent $184 million on projects to protect and restore salmon habitat from the Puget Sound Acquisition and Restoration Fund (PSAR). By way of comparison, cost overruns on just three Seattle City Light projects will cost $188 million.
Seattle City Light, which calls itself “The Nation’s Greenest Utility,” is wasting a decade's worth of funding for salmon recovery projects. There must be accountability for this waste. The Salmon Recovery Funding Board should reject the City’s new requests for salmon recovery funding. Other communities shouldn’t have to bail out Seattle’s wasteful mismanagement.
The Seattle Times outlined the overruns: “The utility is paying $210 million to build a new Denny Substation that early engineering estimates pegged at $89 million. The cost of a new billing system with Seattle Public Utilities soared from $48 million to $110 million.”
Additionally, they noted that City Light failed to budget for $5.4 million in sales taxes for new smart meters the utility bought.
PSAR is focused on salmon recovery projects, including local restoration projects like this one from the Lummis to restore habitat in the Nooksack, or this one (ironically from Seattle Public Utilities) to reduce invasive knotweed along the Cedar River to improve shading and reduce water temperature. During the last decade, projects like these have restored 4,600 acres of river shoreline, 2,700 acres of estuary habitat, and nearly 10,000 acres of watershed habitat. PSAR funds are also used to remove culverts that block habitat. The state is under a court order to fix these fish barriers across the state.
Currently, Seattle City Light has requested $1.6 million to acquire land for salmon habitat in the Skagit Valley. Seattle Public Utilities has a request for an additional $1 million from the state for a project on a creek that flows into Lake Washington.
With so many projects competing for funding, the state should reject funding for these projects as long as the city is wasting enormous amounts of its own money while asking state taxpayers to fund its projects. If there is no accountability for Seattle City Light’s wasteful mismanagement, they will continue to be thoughtless about how they spend money.