SNOHOMISH – The 100 or so families who live above Ebey Slough just south of the U.S. 2 trestle thought they had a good deal back in the late 1990s.
After much fighting, Puget Sound Energy had agreed to not move a high-voltage power line along the edge of their properties.
Instead, it would stay in the lowlands just east of Ebey Slough, in view, but far enough away, they believed, to not harm property values along their picturesque ridge.
“The promise was a good-faith agreement that they agreed to,” said Steve Pierce, a trucker who cherishes his sunsets over the Snohomish River. “There are a number of witnesses that heard them.”
Now Puget Sound Energy has come back to the neighborhood, again proposing to move the power line next to their homes.
Several alignments are proposed, but the one along the base of the ridge is the favored option because it is out of the tidal wetlands, PSE representatives told Smith and other residents at a recent public meeting.
In the intervening 10 years since the residents first fought PSE, interest in that section of Ebey Slough has waned, a diking district has been abandoned and a tidal floodgate has been stuck in the open position.
The result is that the area has become wetter and wetter, and federal officials have told the county that the land is well on its way to becoming a wetlands again, a process that federal officials are hesitant to stop, said Steve Thomsen, Snohomish County Public Works director.
That water, backed up to the base of the ridge on Friday, makes it even tougher today than 10 years ago for PSE to locate the power line in the middle of the lowland area, said Dorothy Bracken, a spokeswoman for the utility.
Still, “PSE has not made a decision on a preferred route,” she said. “We’re looking at every option.”
Pierce said it’s clear that the real focus is on the alignment along the base of the ridge.
“All of the dust that we kicked up, all of the hostility, really boiled down to nothing but a fart in a windstorm,” he said.
David Robinett said he could cope if the new power line is at its current location, but he fears that isn’t going to happen.
“We know the line is needed by the community, but we don’t think it needs to be right in front of our faces,” he said. “In their preferred alignment they show putting a pole in my property.”
Robinett and Pierce said the neighborhood is organized and ready to fight, just as it did 10 years ago.
Bracken said the wooden power poles are failing because wood sitting in water rots. Already several poles are leaning over and are in danger of falling, she said.
Bracken said PSE backed out of the agreement to use the existing route because the county could not follow through with an agreement to keep the diking district in operation.
Thomsen said the county didn’t back out until a year after PSE decided the current route was too risky.
Reporter Lukas Velush: 425-339-3449 or lvelush@heraldnet.com.
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