Dissent dominates beach policy hearing

TULALIP – Nontribal homeowners who live on the Tulalip Reservation say only a federal judge can resolve their dispute with the tribe, but they attended a Tulalip Planning Commission hearing Wednesday night for a chance to speak their minds.

“This is not a court, but we have to get our point across,” Mission Beach resident Steve Ahmann said.

Ahmann and about 150 others crowded into a gym at the Boys &Girls Club in Tulalip to oppose the tribe’s Tidelands Management Policies, a document that was first introduced about three years ago. After a series of heated public hearings in 2003, the tribe took the document back for revision. Wednesday’s hearing was the first for the revised policies.

No follow-up meetings are planned at this point.

The policy will preside over the beaches of Tulalip Bay, which was guaranteed to the tribe by the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott. The tribe claims that nontribal development has caused erosion and disrupts their tribal practices.

The nontribal homeowners say the tribe’s jurisdiction over certain pieces of the shoreline was sold over time to others. The land Irma Erickson lives on at Priest Point was purchased in 1920, she said, from an American Indian.

“I’m going to make one statement, and I’m sure it won’t come as a surprise to you: I own the tidelands,” she said. “I have no choice but to defend my property.”

For the homeowners, many of whom are members of the Marysville Tulalip Community Association, an organization that formed to fight what they say is the tribe’s encroachment on their property, the problem isn’t the tribe’s environmental policy, but its claim to jurisdiction.

“Until a decision is handed down, the tidelands are under the sole jurisdiction of the state of Washington and of Snohomish County,” Ahmann said.

Snohomish County has designated the tidelands as “disputed lands” in its shoreline management program, but says county regulations apply. The homeowners say the county hasn’t stepped up to handle the regulations.

Eventually, the matter will come before a federal judge, Ahmann said, but the Marysville Tulalip Community Association hasn’t yet begun that process.

For the tribe, every day that passes without tight tideland regulations brings more damage.

“If we don’t do a good job today, it will only be a memory,” planning commission chairman Bill Shelton said. “Believe me, it won’t take long.”

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