I’ve lived and worked in Skagit Valley most of my life. Mount Vernon, class of ’94.
For years, I worked in restaurants—cooking, managing, owning. It’s a system that doesn’t tolerate confusion. When something breaks, you feel it immediately. You learn to value clarity, timing, and clean information flow.
I stepped away, and taught myself to code.
What started with Python and databases turned into something more focused: understanding how local systems actually work. Parcels. Zoning. Taxes. Permits. The rules that shape what gets built, what changes, and what doesn’t.
The problem isn’t that the data doesn’t exist. It does.
The problem is fragmentation.
Public information is spread across agencies, buried in PDFs, locked in disconnected systems. Technically available, but practically unusable.
OpenSkagit is my attempt to fix that.
This is not a company. It’s not an official source. It’s a working system built to connect real data, constrain it properly, and make it usable at the parcel level—where decisions actually happen.
Everything starts with a place.
Understand the place, and the system reveals itself.
From there, you can trace zoning, jurisdiction, overlays, and law—without guessing, without mixing sources, without losing context.
The goal is simple:
Make local systems legible.
If you live in Skagit Valley and want to understand how things actually work—this is for you.
— Ian