The Ex-Fisherman Who Wants to Fix Your Airport

Most people who move to Whatcom County don’t start by picking blueberries. Tor Benson did.

“My first job when I moved here was working harvest at Jake Mayberry farm, blueberries and raspberries,” he says, leaning back in his office chair. It’s a disarming detail from a man with a résumé that reads like two careers stitched together: commercial fisherman, ship coordinator, Certified Financial Planner, and former tax preparer. He is running for Port of Bellingham Commissioner in District 4, which covers the Ferndale and Lynden corridor,  farm country, not waterfront. That, he argues, is exactly the point.

Benson was born in Petersburg, Alaska, a fishing community of a few thousand people near the southern end of the Southeast Alaska panhandle. He moved to Olympia at age five, eventually made his way to Oregon State University, and graduated Summa Cum Laude with degrees in biology and education and a minor in chemistry. He paid for it the way people from fishing towns pay for things: he went back to Alaska and fished. After graduation, he bought his first commercial boat. Then another. For ten years he owned and operated fishing vessels in Alaskan waters. “I got a good marine background there,” he says, as someone that seems to not like bragging about himself.

Today, Benson coordinates tanker and cargo ship operations at local refineries and the Bellingham Shipping Terminal, a job that puts him in daily contact with the same infrastructure the Port oversees. He also runs a financial planning practice out of the same building. He is, in the most literal sense, doing two jobs at once. When the obvious question raise,  doesn’t coordinate ships for a private company while overseeing the Port create a conflict of interest?  Benson doesn’t flinch. “I’m a third party. These vessels come in, they use the terminal, and I make sure the port call goes smoothly. I’m not awarding contracts. I’m not directly involved.” He pauses. “And if an issue came up, I’d declare it.”

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2026 Election Coverage by Greg Thames for Bellingham Metro News

Ask Benson what keeps him up at night about the Port, and he doesn’t hesitate: the airport. Bellingham International is losing money. Allegiant Air pulled its local crew base out of Bellingham, trimmed its flights, and the ripple effects have been painful, vendors are asking for discounts because foot traffic has dropped, Canadian passengers who once crossed the border to fly have slowed to a trickle, and the whole system is caught in what Benson calls “a negative feedback loop.” His prescription is straightforward, if not simple. The Port needs a dedicated marketing budget,  there’s a proposal on the table to allocate 5% of gross revenue toward promotion, and Benson supports it. More importantly, he says the Port needs to stop waiting for airlines to come to them. “You bring data to airlines and you say: we have passengers flying out of Seattle who would prefer to fly out of Bellingham. Can we get a flight to Oakland?” He points to a previous Allegiant route as proof of concept. “That flight ran at 88% capacity. A lot of people were taking it. It just didn’t fit Allegiant’s overall network.” The opportunity is there, he argues. The Port just needs to make the case, loudly and with numbers.

One of the more pointed moments of the interview comes when I asked Benson to identify a specific Port decision he disagreed with. He brings up recreational moorage rates. When the Port set those rates, commissioners looked at what other Washington harbors were charging and decided to land in the middle. Benson’s objection isn’t necessarily to the final number, it’s to the logic. “That’s arbitrary,” he says. “We need to know exactly how much money we need, by when, and work backward from there. Not just look at what everyone else is doing and shrug.” It’s the kind of thinking you’d expect from a certified financial planner and Benson is clearly aware that his background is his differentiator. He’s not a developer. He’s not a lawyer. He knows marine environments, he knows shipping, and he knows what a balance sheet is supposed to do.

District 4 is not a waterfront district. Ferndale and Lynden are dairy farms, berry fields, and agricultural families, voters who could be forgiven for wondering what the Port of Bellingham has to do with them. Benson’s answer starts 105 years in the past. The Port was created, he notes, because a railroad monopoly was choking commerce. The mission was never just ships and harbors. It was always about making commerce easier for everyone in the county. The Port’s recent purchase of Boxxberry farm, now operating as an agricultural research and incubator facility,  is the kind of move he wants to see more of. “We need to keep exploring options for agriculture,” he says. “That’s not an afterthought. That’s the job.” He also wants the Port to hire a dedicated public relations role — a point person to communicate what the Port is doing and, just as importantly, to actually listen to what residents want to see happen with major developments like the waterfront pump track and container village.

When I asked Benson the inevitable hypothetical, if you could do anything you wanted with the Port, what would a perfect Port look like?  The answer is revealing for what it isn’t. It isn’t a list of projects. It isn’t a vision statement. “Collaboration is the best way,” Benson says. “I don’t think I have all the answers. I think I bring skill sets, and then you go into a room and people bring other perspectives, and it changes your idea.” He commits to putting in 20 hours a week. He talks about being one of five commissioners, not a unilateral decision-maker. It’s a notably humble answer from a candidate with an objectively unusual résumé,  but it lands as genuine rather than rehearsed.

The fisherman from Petersburg, the berry picker from Jake Mayberry farm, the man who still coordinates tankers by day and financial plans by evening, seems to understand something that not all candidates do: that showing up prepared and willing to listen is most of the job.

Tor Benson is a candidate for Port of Bellingham Commissioner, District 4. The primary election takes place this August.

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Greg Thames

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