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WA Legislator Wants to Give Seattle What It Asks For
If you follow the Northwest news at all, you will be familiar with the story of the environmentalists behind the drive to remove dams on the Snake River to improve the habitat for endangered salmon. Nevermind that removal of those dams would also result in the loss of many megawatts of clean, carbon-free energy production for eastern Washington, and add thousands of trucks and rail cars to carry all the cargo that was previously carried on the river. Local agricultural and utility interests in eastern Washington have spoken with alarm about this proposal. Some economists have also come out against it, demonstrating that dam removal would have negative consequences for the entire region, even absent the enormous costs for removing the dams.
Now, a State Senator has proposed a bill in the legislature in Olympia, to essentially give the citizens of Seattle (who are so numerous and so Leftist that they essentially run the State) the kind of project that they are asking the citizens of the other half of the state to accept. Senate Bill 6380 would launch a study of breaching the Ballard Locks and removing the Seattle City Light Dams, to restore Seattle waterways to their pristine condition. It would also restore Lake Washington to its original condition, and remove Ravenna Creek from its sewer pipe back to the surface.
This is the Gorge Dam, one of those Seattle City Light-run dams that brings electricity to the Social Justice Warriors of Seattle.
The story above describes how the proposal would let the Skagit River run free as it did in the early 20th century. This story just made me smile, and I am interested in hearing how the Seattle contingent in the State Legislature responds to it. Tit-for-tat; you want to take eastern Washington back to the 19th century, maybe you should contemplate western Washington being returned to the 19th century.
Oh, and the Senator who proposed this bill is a Republican from Ferndale, a town in western Washington just south of the Canadian border. Thanks, Senator Ericksen!
Crossposted at RushBabe49.com.
Published in Environment
In the U.S. I think that started to change in the 1960s, but the dams kept getting built for a while, no matter the communities destroyed and private property seized to build them. Land was seized for a big dam on the Delaware River, but then sentiment started to turn against dams, and that one was not built. However, the land was not given back to the original owners and still remains in federal government hands. In Kentucky in the early 80s I became aware that there were locals who still resented the fact that land that had been taken for TVA projects. When bicycling through some of the TVA country in 2006 I got the sense that resentments still lingered, although it was a new generation that would have liked to get its parents’ and grandparents’ property back. I haven’t been back there more recently.