For months, secret negotiations that would end up helping the Royal Dutch Shell oil company had been under way at the Port of Seattle, whose slogan is “Where a sustainable world is headed.” Then on January 7, the SeattlePI.com broke the news: A partnership between Shell and the port had been proposed, part of a deal that would create a new winter home for the $234 billion oil company’s Arctic drilling fleet. It was the first time the public learned a climate bomb might be stashed on Seattle’s waterfront, and it was followed, less than a week later, by a strange public meeting of the elected officials who make up our local port commission.
That meeting took place in a Sea-Tac Airport conference room in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, and it involved some swift and questionable decision making—whether by design or happenstance is unclear. During the meeting, all five port commissioners expressed discomfort with the potential environmental impacts of Arctic drilling, but when one commissioner—Tom Albro—raised a motion that could have stalled the push to host Shell’s rigs and led to more debate, no one seconded his motion. Absent a second, the deal was effectively sealed and the five-day period for the people of Seattle to react to this proposal ended.
The speed with which this public process played out stands in stark contrast to the more than four months that were taken for behind-closed-doors decision making at the port, where commissioners knew about the proposed lease for Shell’s Arctic vessels as early as late summer of 2014. “If one were to run an actual public process, the port would have heard loud and clear from the public, ‘Please don’t do this,'” Seattle City Council member Mike O’Brien told The Stranger. “Whoever’s in charge of the port knew the answer they would get, so they designed a process that was very secretive with the absolute minimum of public input as possible.”
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