It would be Pierce County’s largest geoduck farm. Locals fought it. Now the state decides

The question of whether the longtime shellfish farm in Burley Lagoon can raise geoducks is inching toward a final answer.

Burley Lagoon, a body of saltwater that connects under the Purdy Bay Bridge to Henderson Bay, has been a site for shellfish cultivation since the 1930s, beginning with a farm operated by Tyee Oyster Company. It’s now managed by Taylor Shellfish Farms, a giant in Washington state’s shellfish industry. The fifth-generation family-owned company began managing the approximately 300-acre Burley Lagoon farm on a lease from Western Oyster Company in 2012, The News Tribune reported.

Since that change in management, residents who live near the lagoon have voiced concerns about Taylor Shellfish’s proposal in 2014 to convert part of the farm to raise the large clams (pronounced “gooeyducks”). The company currently raises Manila clams and Pacific oysters there.

The state Department of Fish and Wildlife website says the average age of the large clams in areas that aren’t fished is 46, and that the oldest found in the state was 173. Companies sell many of those they harvest overseas. A Taylor Shellfish spokesperson told The News Tribune previously that the company sold about half of the 900,000 pounds of geoduck it harvested in 2020 to China.

Taylor Shellfish’s operations leave behind aquaculture debris, create noise at night, shine lights into people’s homes, interfere with water recreation, drive away local wildlife and cause other problems, over 40 locals said at a public hearing before Gig Harbor-area and Key Peninsula land commissions in May 2023.

The hearing gave the public a chance to comment before the Pierce County Deputy Hearing Examiner decided whether to approve permits for the geoduck farm.

That decision is now out.

The hearing examiner approved the company’s applications for a “shoreline substantial development permit” and a “shoreline conditional use permit” on Dec. 2, according to the Pierce County website. The examiner also rejected several local environmental groups’ appeals of the project’s environmental impact statement, which found that the geoduck farm would have “negligible” to “minor” impacts on the lagoon environment.

Taylor Shellfish emphasized in a press release Nov. 27 that the examiner’s decision was the culmination of “a long and extensive process” spanning over six years.

“The Hearing Examiner held a combined hearing on the appeal of the EIS and the shoreline permits in May 2024 and then spent several months carefully considering all the information and testimony presented during the hearing,” the press release said. “… The EIS is one of the most robust assessments on geoduck culture developed to date and we are pleased that the Hearing Examiner agreed with that.”

The company has made changes in response to residents’ concerns, according to Taylor Shellfish spokesperson Bill Dewey. These include noise- and light-reducing measures such as changing the type of equipment they use on their boats and committing to use a type of flexible mesh tube to raise geoducks that reduces the risk of creating aquaculture debris, among other things, he wrote in an email Dec. 11.

“Since Taylor began operating the farm we have strived to be a good neighbor,” Dewey wrote. “When people contact us with legitimate concerns we do our best to promptly address them. This is how we strive to operate all of our farms.”

The company doesn’t have a date set for moving forward, according to Dewey.

“When we do start, the first step in that process would involve placing mesh nursery tubes in the substrate in which geoduck seed would be planted,” he wrote.

Residents say they’re waiting for decision from Ecology

The hearing examiner’s decision moved to the Washington State Department of Ecology Dec. 18.

Ecology has 30 days from when they received the decision to review it, according to Curt Hart, spokesperson for the Department of Ecology. He said they’ll issue the decision to approve, approve with conditions or deny Taylor Shellfish’s application for a Shoreline Conditional Use permit by Jan. 17.

At that point, anyone who wants to challenge Ecology’s decision will have 21 days to petition the state shorelines hearings board, he confirmed.

Burley Lagoon resident Heather McFarlane and others opposed to the geoduck farm are waiting for the Department of Ecology’s decision before taking any next steps. Many of them are part of Friends of Burley Lagoon, a nonprofit McFarlane founded to monitor aquaculture in the lagoon and other Puget Sound tidelands.

The organization announced on their website that they see the hearing examiner’s decision as “not great,” but “not a surprise and … just a step in the on-going process.”

“There are facets of the 150-page decision that are being reviewed by our attorney and will almost certainly be appealed,” the website says. “Moving forward to the state level, our attorney is already preparing for the State Shorelines Hearings Board.”

McFarlane and five other residents told The News Tribune about their disappointment with the hearing examiner’s decision in a video call Dec. 10.

Janey Aiken, who has lived in Burley Lagoon for about 32 years, said she feels like the county prioritized technical expertise over residents’ lived experiences when making its decision. Lisette West echoed that frustration, saying that residents have submitted photo evidence of plastic aquaculture debris.

Carl Marlow moved to a waterfront home on the lagoon eight years ago. He said that residents have filled two flatbed trucks with plastic debris they picked up from a 1-mile stretch of shoreline. He’s joined them in clean-up efforts and has written to Taylor Shellfish to request that the company does more to clean up the shoreline, he said.

Aiken said they’re aware not all of the debris comes from Taylor Shellfish, as they’ve found some debris that they can tell is from companies in other areas.

“This is a cumulative effect from all of Puget Sound,” Aiken said.

Long-time residents Wendy Ferrell and Lorrie Peterson were among those that said they preferred when operations were run by Western Oyster Company, prior to Taylor Shellfish.

Western Oyster Company “did not put these huge predator exclusion nets over the tidelands at all,” Ferrell said. “They didn’t use a huge motorized barge … it was all done by hand back then.”

Peterson agreed. She remembers workers using lanterns at night, which twinkled on the shore. She said she believed the company was aware that they were working in a residential area and was respectful of that.

The group said more recently residents have noticed noise and light from shellfish operations disturbing homes in the middle of the night, machinery blocking the path of salmon through the lagoon, and fewer sand dollars and tidepool creatures.

‘We are doing all we can to minimize any negative impacts.’

Dewey, the Taylor Shellfish spokesperson, offered several examples of changes the company made in response to residents’ concerns. These and many others are explained in the hearing examiner’s decision, he wrote in an email Dec. 11.

To reduce noise, Taylor Shellfish has committed to using rubber mats on harvest vessels, switching from gas to diesel generators, cooling engines with water instead of air, and putting pumps in a box with sound-dampening material, he wrote. They’re also “using low-impact headlamps with lighting directed to minimize glare” and “avoiding overhead lighting on boats (using instead a small light to indicate bow and stern),” as well as “revising work schedules to minimize early morning and later evening harvest work in populated areas.”

The company is also responding to concerns about aquaculture debris, according to Dewey.

“Taylor has committed to using the flexible mesh HDPE (high density polyethylene) tubes at the Burley Lagoon farm, unless the flexible tubes do not perform as expected in the subtidal portions of the farm, in which case they will use rigid HDPE tubes in subtidal areas,” he wrote.

According to the hearing examiner’s decision, the flexible mesh tubes “require less equipment and noise to install, result in significantly less plastic being deployed, and stay lodged within the sediment better than PVC (polyvinyl chloride) tubes, reducing the potential for aquaculture debris.”

The company has participated in local water quality protection meetings and area-wide clean-ups, and removed an estimated 100 commercial containers of pre-existing debris when it started operating the Burley Lagoon farm, Dewey said. The company has also supported various community organizations such as Harbor Wildwatch, Great Peninsula Conservancy and Pacific Education Institute, he said.

“As for how we are responding to concerns about impacts to wildlife and salmonids, I think that we mutually agreed with Pierce County in 2016 to complete an EIS for the project speaks volumes to Taylor’s commitment to ensure we are doing all we can to minimize any negative impacts,” he wrote.

The News Tribune reached out to the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association, an association that represents shellfish farmers in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California and Hawaii, to ask about environmentally-friendly shellfish practices.

Margaret Pilaro, executive director of the PCSGA, told The News Tribune that the organization develops a set of best management practices they recommend for shellfish growers to raise shellfish sustainably. Growers, marine scientists and regulatory agencies help shape these recommendations, which are called environmental codes of practice, according to the association’s website. She said Taylor Shellfish is one of the growers that has attested to these codes.

Asked about how other shellfish farms work to reduce aquaculture debris, Pilaro said that growers broadly are required to track where their gear goes if it gets loose, though nobody wants that to happen. That’s generally part of the permitting requirements for shellfish farms, according to Pilaro.

“This is a highly regulated industry,” she said.