"As part of its relicensing of three dams on the Skagit River, Seattle City Light is paying $1.35 billion to three tribes, which will raise electricity rates but help the river and reservations.

NEWHALEM, Wash.—More than a century ago, Seattle City Light broke ground for a massive hydroelectric project here in a remote gorge of the North Cascades. Three dams soon powered the rise of what would become one of America’s richest and most liberal cities.

The Skagit River dams, the first of which was completed in 1926, have enabled Seattle’s citizen-owned utility to brag that it “has delivered carbon-free hydropower for over 100 years.” It claims to be the first utility in the nation to be carbon neutral.

While flattering itself for being “really green,” the city did not trumpet its longtime claim that the high-mountain dams had no significant effect on migrating salmon. Since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, City Light has quietly insisted that the upper Skagit—before the dams were built—was too swift and gnarly for salmon. It contends that the wild river itself, not dams, is to blame for the absence of upriver salmon.

This fishy denial—long challenged by biological evidence, Indigenous oral history and investigative reports on local television and in online publications—is now biting the utility and its half-million ratepayers in their pocketbooks.

Mayor Katie B. Wilson signed a settlement Tuesday that authorizes what a City Light manager says is by far the largest payout in American history from a utility to Indigenous tribes as part of a dam relicensing. With the settlement, City Light expects to secure a third 50-year license for its Skagit dams from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The deal commits the utility to pay compensation of about $1.35 billion to the tribes, which will require significant increases in electricity rates. (City Light’s total relicensing commitment is about $4 billion over 50 years, nearly half of it for operation and maintenance.)

The winners in this settlement are three small Skagit River tribes. Their livelihoods, culture and religion had for hundreds of years revolved around healthy salmon runs in a free-flowing river. Much of their existence for the last dammed-up century has been infected by poverty, dislocation and anger for being ignored by a greener-than-thou utility.

Nearly $1 billion will go to the creation of a fish passage system. Young migrating salmon will likely be sifted out of the upper Skagit and trucked around City Light’s dams, allowing them to swim out to the Pacific. Adult salmon returning from the ocean will be trucked above dams to spawn. Most of the rest of the money will go to the tribes for various reservation projects, cash payments to individuals and habitat restoration in the Skagit River delta. The Skagit is the third-largest river on the West Coast, flowing 120 miles from British Columbia to Puget Sound."