In 2017, a net-pen farm failure off Cypress Island in Skagit County released 260,000 Atlantic salmon into Washington waters that are unrecovered to this day. On Jan. 7, the Board of Natural Resources will vote on whether banning the enclosed floating cages used for fish farming should be codified into law.

The state Senate passed a bill in 2018 to protect the state’s waters by phasing out Atlantic salmon net-pen farming by prohibiting Natural Resources from entering a new lease or other aquatic lands use authorization that involves Atlantic salmon.

Additionally, Natural Resources would not be allowed to renew or extend an existing lease that involves Atlantic salmon farming. Existing leases will terminate by next year.

Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz banned net pen aquaculture via commissioner’s order in 2022, which can be overturned by the next commissioner, so she’s advocating for the policy to be codified via board vote as she prepares to leave office in January.

Invasive fish species compete with native salmon in the Salish Sea, said Marnie Jackson, executive director of the Langley-based Whidbey Environmental Action Network or WEAN. Fish farm salmon can carry diseases and disrupt the food web.

“When introducing this invasive species into the water, you threaten the survival of not just the native salmon, but every species that depends on them for survival,” she said.

Healthy invasive fish outcompete native ones, she said. Unhealthy ones often carry diseases that decimate them. Whether invasives are stronger or weaker than the native fish, they cause massive problems.

Net-pens cause economic harm too, Jackson said.

“We do have a very vibrant local aquaculture economy,” she said, “the mussels in Penn Cove, the line fishing that happens around the Sound, the tribal fishing and tribal fisheries rights that are protected by treaties, all of these industries and activities are actually threatened by net-pens.”

Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe is the loudest opposition to the ban, said Joe Smillie, communications officer for the Department of Natural Resources. In December 2022, the tribe filed a lawsuit against the department to restore what it claims is its treaty right to engage in net-pen aquiculture.

The ban does not and would not apply to tribes, Smillie said.

Whidbey Island has long been a harbinger for this issue.

In the early 2010s, WEAN pushed to ban net-pens in county law, which resulted in the commissioners including a ban in the 2015 Shoreline Master Program update two years prior to the Cypress Island disaster, Jackson said.

As a result, the Department of Ecology challenged Island County on its right to have such a ban. At the time, WEAN co-founder Steve Erickson presented reasons for instituting the ban. After two years of review, Ecology decided to allow the county to uphold the ban.

At the time, Ecology’s rulemaking pulled from information from the 1980s, Jackson said, and modern research demonstrated the hazards of such aquaculture.

“Had Island County’s example been taken to heart by neighboring counties or by the Washington State Department of Ecology, we might have actually prevented this very serious environmental disaster,” she said.