SAVE FAMILY FARMING - Blog, Whats Upstream
The agricultural community, Skagit dike districts, tribal governments, and local officials are watching closely as the long delayed FERC settlement for the Skagit River dams approaches publication. Years of conflict, negotiation, and uncertainty have led to this moment.
And now, at the eleventh hour, the City of Seattle has installed an environmental lawyer to be its highest-paid employee, the acting CEO of Seattle City Light–a man named Dennis McLerran.
That decision raises a simple and unavoidable question: who is Dennis McLerran?
A Last Minute Appointment With Long Shadows
Seattle City Light wants the public to believe that appointing Dennis McLerran as its acting CEO is a move toward stability, collaboration, and renewed trust. But that narrative does not survive even casual contact with the facts.
For communities in the Skagit Valley, tribal governments, drainage districts, farmers, and local officials, Dennis McLerran is not a fresh start. He is a familiar figure tied to a long running and carefully managed effort by the City of Seattle to consolidate political control over the Skagit watershed while avoiding its most basic obligation: fish passage at its dams.
This is not speculation. It is documented, inconvenient history.
Anyone Remember the “What’s Upstream” Campaign Fiasco?
Before the current crisis at Seattle City Light, before the turmoil surrounding the federal relicensing of the Skagit River dams, there was the “What’s Upstream” campaign. Funded with taxpayer dollars and promoted while McLerran served as EPA Region 10 Administrator, the campaign targeted Western Washington agriculture with deceptive imagery and inflammatory claims dressed up as public education.
The McLerran-led “What’s Upstream” campaign deepened tribal local tensions, vilified farmers, and ultimately collapsed under scrutiny. The backlash was significant, and the campaign was widely discredited, including by some environmental advocates who wanted no part of it once the facts were examined.
For many in the Skagit, this episode established a lasting impression. Dennis McLerran does not bring people together. He polarizes communities while reliably advancing the interests of powerful institutions.
From Skagit to Yakima: A Pattern Repeats
Sadly, this troubling pattern extends far beyond the Skagit, and is illustrated in the shocking history of the EPA’s use of falsified science, coverups of likely-illegal official document manipulation, and brazen litigatory attacks on family dairies in Washington’s Lower Yakima Valley, beginning under McLerran’s leadership of the federal agency’s Region 10 office in Seattle.
That history matters because Seattle City Light now is attempting to present McLerran as a unifying figure. In reality, he is deeply embedded in the exact legal and political strategy that has driven conflict in the Skagit and across Washington state for more than a decade.
Seattle’s Apparent Strategy
At the center of that strategy is the federal relicensing of Seattle City Light’s Skagit River dams. For years, Seattle City Light has relied on Cascadia Law Group to represent it in that process. The firm has received millions of dollars from the City of Seattle for this work, spread across years of litigation and contract renewals. Dennis McLerran is an attorney with Cascadia Law Group and is identified in Seattle’s own contracts as representing Seattle City Light in the relicensing.
The objective of that representation has been remarkably consistent. Avoid fish passage at the dams. Replace it with alternative mitigation that allows Seattle to retain control over funding, planning, and outcomes in the Skagit. This approach conflicts directly with long standing recovery plans and prior agreements in which Seattle committed to focusing on passage at its dams, while tribal and local governments led watershed restoration efforts.
McLerran’s role in the Skagit has extended beyond private legal advocacy. He also served on the Skagit Environmental Endowment Commission, a body created under the High Ross Treaty and partially appointed by the City of Seattle. During his tenure, local stakeholders submitted formal objections into the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission record, raising concerns about a conflict of interest created by McLerran’s simultaneous affiliation as an attorney with Cascadia Law Group which represents Seattle City Light in the relicensing of the Skagit River dams.
Those objections were not abstract. They pointed to the practical reality that the same individual was positioned, as an SEEC board member, to influence outcomes affecting the Skagit watershed through multiple institutional channels while representing the same client. Following the submission of those objections, McLerran resigned from the commission.
Influence First, Accountability Later
That episode illustrates a pattern that tribal governments, drainage districts, farmers, and local officials in the Skagit have encountered repeatedly. Influence is asserted first. Accountability follows only after conflicts are formally challenged and placed on the public record.
Today, that pattern has scaled up. McLerran serves as chair of the Puget Sound Partnership’s Leadership Council, an organization that increasingly functions not as a neutral convener but as a vehicle for advancing Seattle City Light’s preferred outcomes in the Skagit.
Legislative proposals supported through this ecosystem would strip local governments of permitting authority over major habitat projects and consolidate decision making at the state level, precisely where Seattle City Light exerts the greatest influence.
Now, with McLerran appointed as acting CEO of Seattle City Light, the lines blur entirely. The same individual leads the utility, is an attorney at the law firm directing its relicensing strategy, and chairs a regional governance body positioned to influence habitat funding and policy decisions affecting the Skagit. This is not collaboration. It is consolidation of authority in a single, very familiar set of untrustworthy hands.
If the goal was to convince the Skagit that Seattle is listening, appointing Dennis McLerran achieves the opposite with impressive efficiency.
Experience Optional, Connections and Agenda Required
Even if these conflicts of interest did not exist, McLerran’s appointment would still raise serious questions. At 75 years old, he has no experience running a utility, a fact that somehow did not disqualify him. Seattle City Light is the 9th largest municipal utility in the country, facing complex infrastructure, workforce, and safety challenges.
McLerran’s predecessor, Dawn Lindell, appeared to be widely respected by employees and credited with addressing long standing problems including sexism, racism, and substance abuse that prior leadership had ignored for decades. Her firing shocked staff and drew immediate public criticism from City Light employees and City Council members alike.
Replacing an experienced utility executive with a politically-connected environmental attorney is not reform. It is damage control, poorly disguised.
Dodging the Bill Instead of Paying It
Seattle City Light faces a significant bill. Fish passage at its dams could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Rather than meet that obligation, the utility appears intent on retaining control over mitigation funds, acquiring land, quietly pulling it off local tax rolls, and dictating outcomes from a distance in a watershed it does not live in and does not govern.
Other utilities operating in the Skagit basin comply with fish passage and habitat obligations without asserting political control over the watershed. Seattle City Light does not.
The community in the Skagit has been clear, repeatedly and in writing. Tribal and local governments are prepared to work together on durable infrastructure, fisheries recovery, and farmland protection. What they will not accept is a top-down arrangement in which Seattle dictates terms through proxies, lawyers, and political pressure.
Dennis McLerran may have many allegiances. In this moment, his allegiance is clear. It is to a distant city’s power utility seeking to avoid its responsibilities.
Seattle can choose transparency. It can choose accountability. It can choose genuine partnership.
Appointing Dennis McLerran does none of those things.
This is not just the wrong choice. It is the clearest signal yet that Seattle City Light intends to keep control at any cost, even if it fractures trust, undermines cooperation, and delays the real work of restoring fish, protecting farms, and respecting the people of the Skagit.
Seattle can do better. The Skagit deserves better. And appointing Dennis McLerran is not just the wrong choice–the city could not have picked a worse person for this moment, in this place, for this problem.
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