[1] With a portfolio of properties ranging from parks and waterfront real estate, to one of the largest airports and container terminals on the West Coast, the Port of Seattle is one of the Pacific Northwest's leading economic engines.

Even before the Port was established, the latter two scored several victories simply by devising plans (a tunnel through Downtown; a uniform alignment of piers) that made enough sense that the railroads and others adopted them more or less voluntarily.

[13] In 1910, pressure toward public ownership of port facilities increased when Tacoma, Washington began building the state's first municipally owned dock.

One of the biggest factors that swayed the votes in favor of creating the port was the prospect of economic growth,[15] especially given the impending 1914 completion of the Panama Canal.

The work of the commission for the first six months was confined almost entirely to the preparation of projects which were duly approved by the people at a special election held on March 5, 1912."

From the first, the Port of Seattle was faced with the fact that most of the key properties on the Central Waterfront on Elliott Bay were already in the hands of the railroads and other vested interests.

[26] By October 1931, low-rent housing in Seattle was oversaturated, and a Hooverville began to form in the abandoned Skinner & Eddy land along Elliott Bay, site of present-day (2023) Terminal 46.

The Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation (Todd Pacific) on Harbor Island scored contracts to build 45 destroyers, which put it in a tie with Bethlehem Steel San Francisco for largest purely military ship production on the U.S. West Coast.

[31] Nor did Seattle's port get its expected share of post-war commercial shipping traffic: for the first time ever, it was outdone even by its neighbor to the south, the far smaller city of Tacoma.

[39] A further proposal to dredge a 350-foot (110 m) wide, 4-mile (6.4 km) channel up the Duwamish River failed to come to fruition due to numerous lawsuits and the annexation of some of the relevant area by Tukwila, Washington, a south-side suburb.

[39] Despite Burke's best efforts, federal changes that introduced a sliding scale to maritime shipping rates in the early 1950s had taken away much of the historic value of Seattle's being the closest major U.S. port to Asia.

[41] The state government followed this up in 1961 by giving the Port expanded taxing authority, while also following a Booz Allen recommendation to get the Commission out of day-to-day operations, instead establishing separate, professionally-run departments for Planning and Research, Data Processing, Real Estate, Trade Development, and Public Relations.

[42] The 1960 Mechanization and Modernization Agreement (M&M) put the ports and labor unions of the West Coast of North America, including Seattle, firmly on the path away from break-bulk cargo toward containerization.

For example, Totem Ocean Trailer Express (now TOTE Group), founded in 1975,[49] opted to base its shipments to Alaska out of Tacoma, where land was cheaper and room for expansion less likely to be an issue.

[52] Years later, the Port invested in a major cold storage facility and Pier 91, which paid off handsomely when Japan dropped a 1971 ban on fruit imports from Washington.

[62] Another round of West Coast maritime labor disputes in September 2022 ultimately worked in Seattle and Tacoma's favor, when they cleared their backups from the strike much more rapidly than the Southern California ports.

"[66] After hiring a new chief of the port police,[67] the organization began to regain its footing, only to be thrust in the spotlight again when former CEO Mic Dinsmore claimed that a sizable severance had been authorized by the commission.

[70] Newly elected commissioners and CEO Yoshitani implemented a series of reforms, including increased commission oversight of port construction projects and consolidation of the organization's procurement activities into one division to afford better control.

[71] The port has many environmental programs, including shore power for cruise ships and a plan to clean up the Lower Duwamish Waterway (in partnership with Boeing, King County, and the City of Seattle).

[83] The initial three-man Port Commission was a compromise team that ran as a slate: former State Lands Commissioner Robert Bridges, a strong Progressive; Charles Remsberg, a Republican banker; and recently retired Army Corps of Engineers brigadier general Hiram M. Chittenden, who was expected to hold down the center.

[84] That organization never succeeded in raising the required US$310,000, and voters assented to a proposal that shifted the "Bush Terminal" money to publicly owned facilities on the mainland side of the East Waterway.

Not only was the ILA faced off against the Waterfront Employers Association (WEA), but the Port and the Teamsters' Union both wavered in between, and newly elected Seattle mayor Charles L. Smith outflanked the Employers Association, undercutting a tentative agreement with the ILA by declaring a "state of emergency" and ordering Seattle police to open port operations by force.

[92] The result was a violent and deadly confrontation known as the "Battle of Smith Cove", followed by federal arbitration that gave the longshoremen almost everything they had initially asked for, and made Seattle a "union port", which it has remained ever since.

[94] The war led to a common cause among management and labor, but the militant International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which had broken away from the ILA in 1937, still harbored strong memories of 1934.

Seattle's Griffiths and & Sprague Stevedoring Company was the first to reach an agreement with the union; the soon Port followed their lead; and while the WEA held out for 95 days, once it became clear that Harry Truman and the Democratic Party would remain in control of the federal government, they also came to the table and negotiated.

[32] As discussed above (see section The Fifties), this labor militancy combined with a lack of leadership vision and several other factors to make for lackluster post-war performance by the Port, extending into the early 1960s.

The Sea-Tac Communities plan, developed over a period of three years and adopted in 1976, established a comprehensive framework to compensate homeowners and other property owners affected by airport noise.

[96] Also controversial was the Pier 86 Grain Terminal (completed 1970), which intruded upon the views of Elliott Bay from Seattle's elite Queen Anne neighborhood, while unloading from "loud[ly] clanking" railroad cars left "clouds of wafting grain-dust".

While the economically successful grain terminal is still there as of 2023[update],[97] there have been mitigation measures, including landscaping and public pedestrian and bicycle paths[50] in what is now the Port-owned 11-acre (4.5 ha) Centennial Park.

[99] In the Dinsmore years, the Port was a strong supporter of NAFTA[100] and was a key player in bringing the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999 to Seattle, which met with massive protests.