A federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington has ruled against Skagit County Dike District 12 in a closely watched environmental case, siding with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) over the future of salmon habitat in the Skagit River delta.

At issue was the district’s plan to replace a tidegate on No Name Slough near the mouth of the Skagit River — a project six years in the making that the district argued was a routine upgrade with benefits for fish. But NMFS, the federal agency charged with protecting marine species under the Endangered Species Act, found that the new tidegate would continue degrading already fragile estuary habitat for at least another 50 years and jeopardize the threatened Puget Sound Chinook salmon and, by extension, the endangered southern resident Orcas that rely on them for food.

The court agreed.

In an order issued April 28, U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian A. Tsuchida denied the district’s motion for summary judgment and upheld NMFS’s biological opinion, which requires substantial habitat mitigation as a condition for the project to move forward.

District 12 Operations Manager Dan Lefeber worries that the mitigation requirements will triple the cost of the already-expensive project. He said the district has voted to appeal the decision.

“What’s right is right in our mind. We don’t want to harm fish if fish were there,” he said, explaining that the slough is so small that it often dries up. “This is not a large body of water. This is not the same conveyance of other channels. It’s a small little deal being used as an example.”

What’s at stake

Tidegates are structures with flaps that swing open to let water drain from low-lying farmland and automatically close to block saltwater from tides, protecting crops from salinization.

In the Skagit delta, an extensive network of tidegates, dikes, and drainage systems makes farming possible on roughly 70,000 acres — land that produces about 90% of Skagit County’s agricultural output. Some of this infrastructure, such as the District 12 system, dates back more than a century.

However, this same system has long posed challenges for native fish species, especially endangered chinook salmon. 

The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, whose reservation sits just west of the project site on Fidalgo Island, filed an amicus brief in support of NMFS that detailed the impact the tidegate replacement would have.

“The tidegate complex to be replaced at No Name Slough directly influences 207 acres of land. It is only one of 38 tidegate complexes — containing a total of 89 individual tidegates — that interface with a natural watercourse and harm salmon and their habitat in the Skagit River delta. Overall, Skagit delta tidegates combine with other pressures on shoreline and estuarine areas such that the ‘general trend’ for listed Chinook salmon ‘is downward and is unlikely to change given current management of these areas,’” according to the Tribe’s brief.

Swinomish Defends salmon

The Tribe, which identifies as the People of the Salmon, emphasized that Chinook are not only central to their culture and way of life, but also to their treaty rights, traditional knowledge, and long-term food security, calling the fish’s survival inseparable from their own.

Swinomish underscored that the tidegate would continue a history of impaired access to rearing habitat critical for young salmon — habitat that has already been diminished due to dikes and drainage infrastructure that converted tidal wetlands into farmland.

“This depressed status (of Chinook salmon recovery) poses an extreme threat to Swinomish as the People of the Salmon, for whom salmon are a fundamental cultural lifeway and federally protected property right under their Treaty, and to the endangered orca dependent upon Chinook as a primary food source,” the Tribe stated.

District disputes impact

District 12 argued that the project wouldn’t expand the footprint of existing infrastructure and would actually improve fish passage. It accused NMFS of flawed analysis, claiming the agency used inconsistent standards, double-counted environmental impacts, and assessed the project as if it were occurring in a pristine natural setting rather than an already-modified one.

But the court rejected those arguments, siding with NMFS’s determination that even a replacement tidegate would perpetuate poor habitat conditions, violating federal law if mitigation measures weren’t required.

“We don’t want to do any harm to the environment. We are all dependent upon each other,” Lefeber said. The district has been trying to replace the tidegate at No Name Slough for six years, ever since the neighboring gate failed. The gate in question is still working, but is in disrepair and may fail at any time. 

“We’ve got to work together to make the whole community be vital…We are just trying to do our jobs here, but we are feeling handcuffed,” Lefeber said.

Broader implications

The ruling affirms that even small infrastructure projects in sensitive ecosystems must comply with the Endangered Species Act’s strict protections. It also signals that federal courts are willing to uphold Indigenous treaty rights and the scientific judgments of federal agencies in the face of local development pressures.

The Pacific Northwest Waterways Association (PNWA), a trade group representing ports, tugs, and agricultural interests, also weighed in as an amicus — but focused on the economic importance of water infrastructure and transport routes. The judge acknowledged those concerns but found that protecting threatened species takes precedence.

For now, the tidegate replacement is on hold unless District 12 agrees to implement mitigation plans required by NMFS.

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Kari Mar: kari@laconnercommunitynews.org. Kari is editor and publisher.