Once Puget Sound’s most polluted, lake attracting new attention

If the lesson of Lake Ballinger could be boiled down to a single sentence, it might read like this: Cleaning even small things can be a big chore.

Named 36 years ago as the dirtiest lake in the Puget Sound region, residents and policy makers have grappled since with a messy problem suspended between jurisdictions.

The 107-acre urban lake largely sits in Mountlake Terrace, is fed mostly by Lynnwood’s Hall Creek, and is drained — too slowly, critics charge — by McAleer Creek, which runs downstream primarily through Mountlake Terrace and the cities of Lake Forest Park and Shoreline.

Somehow, of the 52 homes around the lake, all but three are located in Edmonds.

Each city brings its own set of issues and hurdles, officials said.

Now, concerns about poor water quality and rampant flooding are driving a new set of conversations in the Lake Ballinger watershed.

The cities asked for $200,000 from Olympia to discuss the issue and plan solutions. The money was included in the state’s final budget, Rep. Marko Liias, D-Mukilteo, said March 12.

Still, a March 26 meeting is scheduled for representatives from the five cities, Snohomish and King counties, the state of Washington, state legislators and Rep. Jay Inslee’s office. The group will meet behind closed doors at Edmonds’ City Hall.

A draft agenda for the meeting lays out a $600,000 preliminary plan for the lake, including $100,000 for public education, $175,000 for interim fixes, and $325,000 to fund a longer-term planning document.

The meeting’s primary goal is to come to agreement on the problems at Ballinger, said DJ Wilson, a first-term councilmember from Edmonds who is helping lead the Lake Ballinger work group.

“The goal this year was to educate our policy makers at the state level, and we’ve done that,” Wilson said.

Liias said he has bought in. Both short- and long-term actions were needed to protect the lake, he said.

A $25,000 study of possible solutions is scheduled to be released within a month, officials said. The study examines both the water coming into Lake Ballinger, and the effect of the water released, said Don Fiene, Edmonds’ assistant city engineer. Flooding is as much a concern downstream as it is at the lake itself for some of the cities, he said.

Solutions for Lake Ballinger have momentum now, said Mike Shaw, Mountlake Terrace’s stormwater program manager. An inter-local agreement between the cities needs to lead to a basin-wide solution, Shaw said.

That’s something homeowners on the lake are looking forward to, said Jerry Thorsen, president of the Lake Ballinger Homeowners Association.

According to a 1982 court order which established the lake’s water levels, the water should rise above 278.5 feet only once every five years. That is not happening.

At least three times in the last two years, the water level has reached 279.4 feet, water levels which flood homes and cause sewage to leak into the lake.

“Because we’re limited with the outflow, (floods) are inevitable,” Thorsen said. The current water levels force problems, he said.

The homeowners association wants the weir, the device which controls the lake’s levels, to work more effectively, he said.

The quality of the water is such that swimming is occasionally forbidden, and blue-green algae blooms in the summer threaten recreation and reinforce the lake’s image as a dirty, polluted place, he said.

The problems are big, officials acknowledged.

That Wilson and the work group are preparing to take them on head-first is a good sign. It might be exactly what Lake Ballinger needs, officials said.

“I’m supportive of (the work group),” said Edmonds mayor Gary Haakenson. “It is going to be a long effort. It is going to need a lot of work from cities other than just Edmonds.”

That’s something the other cities tangibly agree with.

In addition to Edmonds, each of the cities of Lynnwood, Mountlake Terrace, Lake Forest Park and Shoreline have signed resolutions in the last two months pledging to work on the Lake Ballinger problem.

Enterprise editor Oscar Halpert contributed to this report.