Our Concerns

As a group, we came together in April 2017 to discuss issues affecting our community in the Snoqualmie Valley. The members of our group are business owners, homeowners, workers, and residents both new and longstanding. Our primary objective is to provide a platform of advocacy for the concerns we see as being underrepresented in our City’s political processes. To read about our environmental and historical concerns about the proposed development, please see our Contamination page and the pages under the History tab. Below is an explanation of our general concerns with the oversight and handling of this property and project

The Snoqualmie Mill site is a 250-acre property situated next to the Snoqualmie River and Falls, along the eastern edge of the City of Snoqualmie in Washington State. As the former site of the Snoqualmie Falls Lumber Co. (Weyerhaeuser), this property has an extensive history as both a natural and an industrial area. Over the past four decades, governmental and private organizations alike have found and documented notable levels of chemical contamination on the Mill site property, and full remediation has not yet been pursued or completed.

Over the past several years, the City of Snoqualmie’s council and mayor have cultivated a tarnished track record in terms of honoring community needs and abiding by the law and city code.

In March 2017, the City of Snoqualmie violated its own city code by failing to notify citizens living within five-hundred feet of a proposed hotel development of a public hearing regarding the project. Upon learning of their mistake, the City chose not to slow or halt the process and instead moved forward with its plans without granting the affected residents retroactive opportunity to comment on the project.

In January 2018, an Ethics Hearing Officer hired by the City of Snoqualmie determined probable cause to support allegations that a City employee had violated ethics standards by supervising and compensating an unlicensed contractor in an unethical manner over the course of several years. 

Further, the City is not the only entity with a less-than-comforting track record of accountability. From January to December 2016, Tom Sroufe of Brookwater Advisors, LLC, the company proposing to develop the Mill site, failed to comply with Department of Ecology standards regarding the monitoring of stormwater discharge on the Mill site property. Sroufe was notified of these twelve violations by the department on September 1, 2017. As of March 2018, no compliant stormwater discharge reports are available via the Department of Ecology’s website regarding the Snoqualmie Mill site. 

As of July 2020, there were over fifty reported violations. To view a complete list of these violations, click here and scroll to the bottom of the page. You will need to turn off the setting on the page where it shows only active permits. Do that by clicking the X in the "Filter Search Result" box near the bottom of the page. See the screen shot below - click the X that the red arrow points to. Then click the "Apply" button below that.

Brookwater Advisors, LLC and Snoqualmie Mill Ventures are now being sued for the above mishandlings by the Waste Action Project out of Seattle. For more information on this case you can review the formal filing.  

Other environmental issues effecting the potential development of the Mill site involve water availability, flood risks, stormwater storage, displacement of and toxicity to wildlife, as well as noise and light pollution for wildlife and community members.

As a group, we are concerned that the City of Snoqualmie and Brookwater Advisors, LLC, based on past violations, may not be up to the task of abiding by the standards and regulations necessary to ensure the protection of the Snoqualmie River as well as future handling of the Mill Site itself in a safe and ecologically sound manner. Our intention is not to portray unnecessary or alarmist suspicion; rather, we aim to operate as cautious advocates focused on the health and safety of our community.