Samantha Cruz-Mendoza. Courtesy to Bellingham Metro News
By Greg Thames | Bellingham Metro News
WHATCOM COUNTY, Wash. — Samantha Cruz-Mendoza slid into her seat at COF& in Bellingham on a Wednesday morning with an emerald green matcha in hand. I asked if it was coffee. She laughed and told me she’d already had one before she got there. For the next half hour, she talked about longshoremen having to drive to Tacoma for work, about dairy farmers absorbing the hit from vanished federal funding, about renters getting priced out of Ferndale, a town that, not long ago, nobody worried about being priced out of.
Cruz-Mendoza grew up all over District Four, Blaine, Ferndale, Lynden and has never strayed far. She earned her degree in criminology, criminal justice, and political science at Washington State University, and is now working toward her law degree at Seattle University through a hybrid program built for working people with busy lives. She is running for Port of Bellingham Commissioner. She has never held elected office.
Those facts will either excite you or concern you. Probably both.
Cruz-Mendoza’s path into public life started not with ambition, but with a bus trip to Olympia. As an undergrad, she did student lobbying at the state legislature — advocating for low-income and rural students — and something clicked. “I really enjoyed that sort of work,” she says. “And I wanted to use my political science degree to pursue that.”
She has been working as Executive Legislative Assistant to Washington State Representative Lillian Ortiz-Self — a Democrat representing Legislative District 21 — since August 2020, handling constituent correspondence, fielding casework, scheduling stakeholder meetings, and sitting in on sessions with union members and community groups. She is clear that she is not policy staff. She does not write the bills. But she is in the room, and she has been paying attention.
That experience, she argues, is precisely what the Port needs more of: someone who has watched how policy gets derailed when the right people aren’t contacted early enough, and who understands that the damage from a closed door is often harder to repair than the damage from a hard decision.
Her policy priorities reveal where her instincts land — and they land with economic pragmatism, with a community-first edge.
Her top concern for North County is agriculture. Federal cuts, she says specifically the rollback of USAID funding have hit Whatcom’s farming communities hard. She sees the Port as a vehicle for workforce investment in that sector, pointing to the Boxberry Farm agricultural research project as a model. The Port’s apprenticeship programs, run through the Working Waterfront Coalition, are a foundation she wants to build on. The problem, as she frames it, isn’t a lack of training it’s a lack of living-wage jobs waiting on the other side of that training.
“We have a lot of really great educational programs here in Whatcom County,” she says. “But there’s a huge lack of living wage jobs, so it’s not a competitive market once you graduate.”
On housing, she parts ways with the dominant local conversation. The affordability crisis, she argues, is not primarily a supply problem. It is an income problem. Building more units without ensuring residents can afford them misses the point. She’d rather see the Port prioritize waterfront jobs in maritime trades, longshore work, and agricultural processing, the kind that put real money in a household budget than push residential development as the primary lever.
She also has Blaine on her mind. The loss of Canadian tourism has quietly gutted Blaine’s economy and hit the Bellingham International Airport harder than most people realize. Over half of the airport’s pre-decline passengers were Canadian. She wants to see Blaine’s waterfront cleaned up and its economy stabilized — and she has the endorsement of Blaine Mayor Mary Lou Steward.
On leases and community benefit, she is open to the idea of tying Port contracts to family-wage standards but is honest that she is still working through the mechanics. When pressed on whether wage floors would be written into leases or left to union collective bargaining agreements, she doesn’t pretend to have a finished answer. “I’d have to look more into that,” she says. “But definitely have a community vision in mind when putting leases on.”
That kind of candor is either refreshing or alarming, depending on what you need from a Port of Bellingham Commissioner.
On the question of ICE and federal agencies at Port properties, she is measured. She wants to review what surveillance and data-sharing arrangements currently exist with federal agencies and limit them where possible. But she is also clear-eyed about the constraints: an international airport requires TSA and DHS presence by federal law. Removing them would strip the airport of its international designation, downgrading it to domestic only a significant concern for a county that sits directly on the Canadian border. She has looked into private security alternatives in the event of another government shutdown noting that some airports already operate under a federal program that allows TSA-approved private contractors though she acknowledges the regulatory complexity and says it is still something she is researching.
The one port decision she is willing to name as a mistake is the ABC Recycling situation and the criticism she levels is less about the decision itself than about how it was handled. Residents in nearby neighborhoods felt locked out. Key discussions happened in the executive session. Outreach was minimal. “A lot of the public felt that decisions were made behind closed doors,” she says.
Her proposed remedy is structural. Under the current three-commissioner setup, any two members speaking together triggers open-meeting requirements which sounds transparent in theory, but in practice it limits informal conversation and forces nearly everything into formal sessions. Whatcom County voters approved expanding the Port Commission from three to five seats, and Cruz-Mendoza sees the two new positions representing Districts Four and Five, the more rural parts of the county, as a genuine opportunity to change the culture. With five commissioners, two can talk freely, gather feedback, and work through ideas without immediately triggering those requirements. More voices, more flexibility, and less pressure to settle everything in one compressed public window.
When asked what in her background prepares her for managing hundreds of millions of dollars in Port assets and long-term lease negotiations, she was straightforward: “In my role in state government, I run one legislative office. I’m not the decision maker. I don’t make any policy decisions but I am privy to a lot of very important information about budget policy and the way state government works. Trying to bring more of that to local government would be very beneficial, specifically with the stakeholder aspect.”
She grew up here. And she is asking Whatcom County voters to bet on that means something before she has ever cast a single vote in public office.
Samantha Cruz-Mendoza is a candidate for Port of Bellingham Commissioner. This interview was conducted at COF& in Bellingham on May 13, 2026.
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