Thank you all so much for joining us at Resilient Foundations yesterday afternoon for an intimate reception as we shared our vision and extended our appreciation to Seattle City Light and its Chief Environmental Officer, Lynn Best.

As promised, we want to share our profile of Lynn with you, as we celebrate Lynn and her accomplishments through out the years and her significant contributions to environmental equity and regional vitality.

Photo by Sustainable Seattle's Engagement Strategist, Tyler Ung

Thought Piece by Sustainable Seattle's Engagement Strategist, Jacqueline Sussman

Over the past year in the Puget Sound region, we’ve witnessed unprecedented momentum around climate justice, equity, and other sustainability-centered efforts, leading to some of the most ambitious and targeted climate initiatives in the country. 

The Seattle City Council unanimously passed a resolution for a local Green New Deal , the Washington Senate passed legislation that would commit the state to ensuring “the right of all Washington residents to a healthful environment,” which led to the Governor’s Interagency Council on Health Disparities to create the state’s first Environmental Justice Task Force in Washington .  

It’s tempting to take these advancements for granted in Seattle, where environmental and progressive movements appear woven into the fabric of the city itself.

However, it’s important to acknowledge the decades-long efforts that have led us here, and the work of those dedicated to leading the way. Lynn Best is one of those people. 

Soon to retire and complete her tenure as Chief Environmental Officer at Seattle City Light, Lynn has spent her entire career working to integrate a whole systems sustainability approach into the operations and culture of one of the country’s most highly-regarded public utilities. 

Lynn started at City Light in 1982 as a Senior Environmental Analyst. Her role evolved substantially over the years, as the utility devoted increasingly more resources to sustainable energy practices.

In the early 2000s, Lynn and her colleagues became increasingly aware of the impacts climate change was wreaking on the ecosystems surrounding City Light’s energy resources. After first moving away from fossil fuel energy and replacing it with renewables, City Light calculated the offsets required to be fully carbon neutral, looking for local options to offset emissions first, such as methane capture from local and regional dairy farms and landfills. In 2005, Seattle City Light achieved carbon-neutral status⎼the first public electric utility in the country to do so. 

“We’re always expanding our notion of what it means to be sustainable. When we first started out, we thought okay we have hydro so we’re not putting pollutants into the air. But very quickly we realized that hydro can have negative impacts on fish. We had downstream effects so we had to change our system so we could protect the fish downstream. We now do that with everything. It’s just a sense of learning best practices for the work we do, looking at ways to reduce impacts in all the different operations we have, planning better, working with colleagues like S2 to find ideas on how we can do more in the community,” said Lynn.  

Video produced by Sustainable Seattle

City Light has a long legacy of prioritizing the health of the environment and communities over profit. One of its most lauded projects is the Skagit River Hydroelectric Project, which in 2003 was designated the “first large hydroelectric facility in the nation to be certified as a Low Impact Hydropower Project by the Low Impact Hydropower Institute, an independent non-profit organization that certifies environmentally responsible, low impact hydro projects.” Lynn Best happened to be the first City Light staff person on that project.

The project consists of three dams situated along the Skagit River in Whatcom County, Washington: The Ross, Diablo and Gorge dams. Hydraulically coordinated to function as a single operation, the dams supply approximately 20% of City Light’s power requirements, while also maintaining favorable flow conditions for salmon and steelhead populations rearing downstream. Residing on indigenous land and within ecologically-sensitive fish and wildlife habitat, the project required a settlement agreement between City Light, local tribes and communities, government entities, and the Province of BC. They sent the plan to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) as the first project with a collaborative approach of its kind, and is now upheld as a national model that’s been deemed “the most comprehensive set of settlement agreements for the public good ever submitted to FERC.” 

As part of the agreement between the Province of BC and the City of Seattle, the Skagit Environmental Endowment Commission was established to preserve and protect the natural and cultural resources of the Upper Skagit Watershed until 2065. The Skagit project was a monumental demonstration of how utilities can work collaboratively with Native American tribes, federal and state agencies, and local communities to reach settlement agreements that effectively mitigate the harmful environmental and social impacts of hydro projects. 

In 2019, Lynn was awarded the Bob Olson Memorial Conservation Eagle Award by the NW Energy Coalition⎼the coalition’s highest honor awarded annually to an individual or organization for their outstanding leadership in moving towards a more clean, equitable and affordable energy future. 

For Lynn, achieving sustainability is an ever moving target. It includes learning best practices and ways to reduce impact, plan better, and collaborate with other leaders in sustainability. It’s about expanding the notion of environmental stewardship from traditional conservation methods to a more holistic, whole systems framework. 

In recent years, City Light has prioritized environmental equity and justice issues in their framework of true sustainability. Lynn believes those efforts need to be deeply tied to the needs and values of the people you’re working to serve. “You have to have connections to the community. You might have an image of what you think a community needs but if you don’t talk to people, you’re just guessing, and that’s not necessarily a good thing...good communication, good outreach, finding out what really matters, involving people- that’s a real high responsibility if you want to do environmental justice.”