Can't Keep Them Down on the Farm

In 1942, Dominic Colasurdo's father sold a five-acre chicken farm in White Center and moved out near the Cascade foothills, just east of Renton, to run a dairy. The family's 110 acres were along the May Valley Creek, which the Works Progress Administration had expanded into a large irrigation ditch. Fish swam up the new stream in enough numbers for 19-year-old Colasurdo to pull out strings of trout and salmon.

For two decades, the stream ran clear. But by the 1960s—when the younger Colasurdo had inherited the farm and switched from dairy to boarding horses—enough dirt and sediment from the surrounding hillsides had started to pour in, along with weeds like reed canary grass, that the creek would stop up and flood the surrounding land. Whenever that happened, Colasurdo would drive a backhoe to the creek's edge and clear it out. Then in 1982, King County declared Colasurdo's property to be a wetland and he was forbidden to go down into the creek. Within four years, he says, the valley was flooding for weeks at a time, and for a longer period every year.

Colasurdo's daughter Mary Celigoy, who has taken over the business, says half the grazing territory is now lost for about six months of the year—first when it's covered by water, and later when it's too marshy for the horses to move around in safely. This year the fields weren't really dry until early July. As a result, she and her dad can't board as many animals as the acreage could support, and instead of eating grass in the fields, the horses now require hay, which has more than doubled in price in the past decade. "My fear is that it's going to get worse," Celigoy says. "If we start getting slop all year round, then we'll be in trouble."

Despite all the efforts at preservation, Colasurdo, 83, says he hasn't seen a fish swim up the choked stream in years. And many of the trees the county planted along the banks to maintain the habitat couldn't survive the flooding. "If they'd just let us get in there and do maintenance, it wouldn't have got like that," he says.

Over the past couple of decades, the failed May Valley Creek policies have become a focal point for rural anger in east King County. Farmers and other landowners there feel controlled by a Seattle-centered government beholden to urban environmentalists who don't understand their lives, habits, or the land they work. The frustration reached its peak in 2004, when the King County Council passed a law proposed by County Executive Ron Sims that forbids most people in rural areas from clearing vegetation on more than 35 percent of their land—whether that's cutting down pines trees or digging up brush.

Colasurdo isn't directly touched by the law; his already-cleared property is grandfathered in. But his experience with county regulations made him sympathetic to those neighbors whose plans to expand pasture land or build another barn were thwarted by the new law. He joined dozens of rural landowners who, outnumbered at the polls and unable to vote out the offending politicians, instead raised money and sued. Earlier this year, they beat the regulators in court. The ruling, if it stands, could serve as a new barbed-wire fence keeping the urban politicians, and their green agendas, out of the rural landowners' backyards. But, in the eyes of county politicians like Sims, that would come at a severe environmental cost.

On the second Monday of each month, Colasurdo and his neighbors gather in a stuffy room off the sanctuary in the May Valley Alliance Church. Fans whir as people start trickling in around the 7 p.m. start time. There are no skinny jeans, only boot-cut, and some of the mostly gray-haired men have been in the valley for decades.

With Robert's Rules of Order only loosely in effect, the July meeting of the May Valley Environmental Council begins with 15 minutes of debate about which were the best planes to fly during the Korean War. There follows another discussion about a pair of beavers that had wrought havoc on a couple of local farms. Someone in the back suggests coaxing them onto the road in the hopes they'll get nailed by traffic. But the biggest topic of discussion, as usual, is the group's beefs with the King County Council, whom members deride as "Seattle City Council, II."

King County is unusually broad in its reach—both in terms of geography and culture. While Oregon's Multnomah County barely stretches beyond the Portland suburbs, and San Francisco County and the city are one and the same, King County encompasses both an extremely liberal urban center and roughly 2,000 square miles of land that does not belong to any city.

In the north there's Skykomish, a 200-person town reachable only by driving an hour through Snohomish County on Highway 2. The Sasquatch comedy Harry and the Hendersons was filmed nearby. The town has a small jail, says mayor Charlotte Mackner, which is used for storing office supplies, old files, and unused furniture.

To the east, the county stretches to Snoqualmie Pass. In the unincorporated town of Hobart, tucked behind Tiger Mountain between Maple Valley and Snoqualmie, there's only one store, Hobart Market and Video. It's at the intersection of several area farms, and it feels a lot farther than 25 miles from downtown Seattle. People stop in to chat with owner Warren Iverson about his most recent hay harvest and what he's asking for a bale.