EVERETT — Snohomish County officials has sent a warning letter to volunteers who belong to a diking district along Ebey Island for performing unpermitted work on the dike.
More than a century ago, Ebey Island residents created a diking district to provide flood protection to farms along the Snohomish River. Now, supported by tax assessments from Ebey Island landowners, the district includes county, state and privately owned properties.
On Monday, Snohomish County county officials sent out a press release stating Diking District 1 had been doing unpermitted work, which the county is still investigating.
In 2023, county staff saw land being moved around the dike, according to an email sent by County Planning and Development Services staff to the Daily Herald.
County staff reached out to the district, which said it was doing normal repair and maintenance, and the county decided to not take action.
In 2024, a neighboring district raised concerns about modifications to the Ebey Island dike, prompting Planning and Development Services to start an investigation that found through the use of light detection and ranging, or lidar, imagery that the dike had been expanded without permits.
The county believes the district increased the height of the dike, which means its less likely to fail in storm situations, but that could mean “neighboring areas would be expected to receive greater impacts during certain flood events,” the county email said.
With climate change and sea level rise, the district said it’s faced increasingly higher flood elevations, and that county projects like the restoration of Chinook Marsh have also put more pressure on the dike. On Wednesday, Meghan Jordan, spokesperson for the county’s Department of Natural Resources, said that construction on the Chinook Marsh project hasn’t begun.
“In our view, it would be against the intent of the laws of the state for DD1 to not respond to changing conditions and maintain its dike and infrastructure accordingly to prevent potentially disastrous failure, as we are chartered to do,” Diking District 1 commissioners Kim Henderson, Stanley Rothfuss and Matthew Pinney said in a joint statement.
The county is investigating the extent of the work to figure out next steps, the email said.
This story has been updated with a response from Snohomish County’s Department of Natural Resources.
Eliza Aronson: 425-339-3434; eliza.aronson@heraldnet.com; X: @ElizaAronson.
Eliza’s stories are supported by the Herald’s Environmental and Climate Reporting Fund.
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