Jennifer Godfrey sat in the audience at Benaroya Hall watching two young women she had coached play classical bass. While the strains of Copland, Mozart and Haydn filled the hall that day in February 2025, she was distracted and troubled.
On her phone, she furiously checked incoming environmental appeals contesting the biggest proposed reshaping of Seattle in the city’s modern history.
A musician with the Seattle Symphony, Godfrey is a self-described science nerd. And what she read in the hundreds of documents prepared for the One Seattle Comprehensive Plan left her worried about the future of trees, streams, salmon and orca.
And so, at the last minute — on her phone — she appealed the Final Environmental Impact Statement to the city hearing examiner last year. With her phone dying, she then called the Hearing Examiner’s Office to make sure she properly paid the required $85 fee.
“It was like throwing spaghetti at the wall. I just thought, ‘What words do I need to put in so that at least I get the right things on the table?’ Honestly, I thought I could just walk away and somebody else is going to file a better appeal than me. I can just peace out and the people who know what they’re doing will be fine.”
What happened next highlights some dark truths about the current state of environmentalism around here.
Instead of Seattle as a kind of ecotopia, city leaders and state legislators effectively rendered it a place where the things that made it great in the first place — trees, water, birds and fish, to be shared and enjoyed by all — are devalued.
Attorneys for Seattle recently argued in court that building new housing trumps all other considerations and impacts. In the city’s view, no one has the ability to even question whether environmental reviews adequately capture the true impacts of building exponentially more housing — on the environment, gentrification or anything else.
That argument is based on measures passed by the Legislature in recent years to clear out challenges to building projects. Whether that point of view wins the day will be determined by the state Court of Appeals, which is currently considering Godfrey’s case.
But no matter the court’s decision, the story doesn’t end there. And when it comes to the balance between new housing and trees, salmon and orca, it likely won’t end well.
Let’s begin this tale in 2005 with the listing of the southern resident killer whale as an endangered species, a move unsuccessfully challenged by the Building Industry Association of Washington.
The orcas are threatened by a lack of salmon, vessel noise and toxin runoff sloughed off from shore. Stormwater pollution, including tire particles and pesticides, poses a direct threat to both the whales and their salmon prey.
What helps clean polluted water? Trees, the larger the better.
Which brings us to a rapidly changing Seattle.
In January 2025, the city Office of Planning & Community Development released the final environmental review on then-Mayor Bruce Harrell’s One Seattle Comprehensive Plan, a growth strategy touted as accommodating more than 330,000 new homes.
On the last day of a two-week appeal period, while watching her students perform at Benaroya Hall, Godfrey tapped out her objections.
The review did not adequately consider the southern resident killer whales or follow the federal government’s recovery efforts, she contended.
“There is no plan to protect and retain the most powerful bio-remediators and bio-retainers, large trees, from development, and there’s no alternative listed that will adequately replace the polluted stormwater filtration currently performed by large trees,” she wrote.
Godfrey might seem an odd person to be the protagonist in such a legal fight. She is not well-known in environmental circles. In fact, she recalled, it was by chance that someone she knew in the symphony connected her with a noted whale expert who mentioned the notion of an appeal.
At the time, the local environmental community was tired and demoralized and divided. No one wanted to take on the entire city government, not to mention incurring the instant catcalls as a NIMBY.
“That has been said a lot of times,” Godfrey told me, rejecting the assertion. “What is good for orcas is good for people. Clean water benefits everybody.”
On April 11 last year, the city hearing examiner tossed out Godfrey’s appeal, citing laws passed by the Legislature in recent years to stave off challenges to new housing.
With the help of attorney Toby Thaler — who is working “low bono,” she says — Godfrey went to the state Court of Appeals. Along the way she was joined by other environmental groups: Birds Connect Seattle, Orca Conservancy, Thornton Creek Alliance and Plant Amnesty, among others.
“One of Godfrey’s main concerns is the unnecessary increase in impervious surfaces resulting from the removal of large trees to accommodate higher density housing,” the group wrote in court documents. “(We) are very familiar with this issue and believe the City has failed to update its tree ordinance to actually ‘protect trees.’”
Environmental harm includes increasing hard surfaces on new infill development, such as allowing 80% or more lot coverage. “The higher percentage of impervious surface allowed, the more difficult it is to mitigate for the significant adverse impacts of toxic laden stormwater runoff,” they wrote.
At the Court of Appeals, an attorney representing Seattle focused on the Legislature’s actions in recent years to streamline more housing as the best reason to reject Godfrey’s case.
“The intent of the statutes is to prevent these exact types of SEPA (State Environmental Policy Act) appeals and instead promote housing construction,” a lawyer for Seattle told the court. “They (legislators) created SEPA and the GMA (Growth Management Act) and they created the appeals process and then they decided to take those appeals processes away for housing legislation like this.”
What’s more, the Seattle City Attorney’s Office makes the case in court documents that other environmental laws protect the city’s green space, such as the Tree Protection Ordinance in 2023.
This is the same measure that was roundly criticized for allowing developers to take down too many large trees, prompting many hundreds of letters asking City Hall to pause. At the time, the city’s own Urban Forestry Commission said the measure failed to protect trees and green space by “introducing ambiguity and favoring development.”
The council voted 8-1 to pass it.
A cynic might argue this was all part of a master plan on behalf of the building industry: push for passage of a flawed tree protection measure, which is then cited in other environmental documents that allow runaway growth. The sentiment behind challenging the endangered species listing for the orca more than two decades ago hasn’t changed.
The Court of Appeals is expected to issue a decision in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, Godfrey filed a separate petition with the Growth Management Hearing Board, raising similar issues and adding concerns about displacement of local residents with low incomes.
But here’s the thing. None of it could make a difference.
If Godfrey wins, the Court of Appeals would send the issue back to the city hearing examiner. The hearing examiner will then take information from competing experts to determine whether the environmental review was sufficient.
If the hearing examiner decides in Godfrey’s favor, city officials should have to come up with measures to mitigate the consequences of rapid development.
But ultimately, the Seattle City Council could choose to simply ignore it all.
That’s right — even if Godfrey wins all along the way, the council could take the position that dense housing increases energy efficiency and reduces carbon emissions and sprawl, and that outweighs any potential downsides.
Meanwhile, Land Use Committee Chair Eddie Lin dropped legislation in Seattle City Council last Wednesday that would eliminate all environmental appeals of Comprehensive Plan amendments and development regulations to the Seattle hearing examiner.
Ecotopia, Seattle is not.
That’s the moral of the story. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In the thousands of policy choices, there is a way to provide wins to those who want more housing as well as those seeking to protect what makes this city great and prevent Seattle from becoming a hot, cramped, treeless biohazard.
For the moment, Godfrey and her allies continue to pull whatever legal levers they can to fight what seems like an inexorable march to a future of regret.
Said Godfrey: “I feel like people are going to probably realize it when it’s too late.”
