Snohomish County asks for its own university

Published 11:21 pm Friday, February 6, 2009

OLYMPIA — For an afternoon, pursuers of a university in Snohomish County didn’t fight about whether the campus should go in Everett or Marysville.

They did disagree, however, on what flag would fly at the entrance and who would run it.

Even as clear differences emerged during a legislative hearing Friday, their common desire for securing firm backing for a four-year college seeped out in conversations afterward.

“The main thing we need to do is get the commitment to get a university in Snohomish County,” said Marysville Mayor Dennis Kendall.

Everett Mayor Ray Stephanson, said, “To have any success this session we have to come together around language we can all support.”

They didn’t voice such feelings as bluntly in Friday’s hearing of the Senate Higher Education and Workforce Development Committee on three bills with very different approaches to launching a university.

Stephanson lined up behind legislation to establish a University of Washington branch campus, which has been the plan of lawmakers for two years.

“This is a critical and far-reaching legislation,” he told committee members. Putting in law that it will be a UW branch campus will make it easier to line up political and financial support for the college when the time arrives for its development, he said.

Kendall backed a competing measure to authorize a college without deciding which existing state university runs it.

Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano Island, who sponsored the bill, has become less enamored with being tied to the UW.

“I don’t care if it is a branch campus. And we all know about the battles that have gone on about siting,” she said. “What I want to do is put a stick in the ground. I am not talking about location. I am talking about innovation and opportunity.”

The third bill would create an independently run polytechnic university built and operated with a voter-approved higher sales taxes in Snohomish County. If voters say no, then all bets are off.

Sen. Steve Hobbs, D-Lake Stevens, wrote the legislation out of frustration with a prolonged process that’s seen the state put up $4 million in 2007 and then take most of it back because of the bitter divide in the community on location.

“I know this (bill) is a little strange, but all I’m asking is for you to give us in the community the option to build this,” he said. “Let us take this off your plate and get it done because we have been talking about this and nothing is happening.”

Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon is backing the Hobbs proposal.

“You wanted action and you did not get action. We can deliver action,” he said, adding no state money is needed.

Reardon also said the area’s legislators and community leaders didn’t step up when given the chance and the Legislature deserves a refund of “all they spent that didn’t materialize in getting the doors open to a college.”

Reporter Jerry Cornfield: 360-352-8623 or jcornfield@heraldnet.com.