Whitney Pipkin has this story in the Skagit Valley Herald:
Businesses along the Swinomish Channel didn’t wonder in the past whether the man-made waterway connecting Skagit and Padilla bays would be dredged every two or three years. It just was.
Scooping piles of sand and silt out of the century-old channel was a regularly funded project of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But that funding dried up for smaller channels — those less than 14 feet deep with less than 10 million tons of cargo passing through each year — in the mid-1990s.
Since then, the Port of Skagit and others have had to lobby for federal earmarks every three years to pay for the necessary dredging.
