Build ferry dock in North Everett

Published 3:21 pm Friday, June 19, 2009

So, now Mukilteo isn’t content acting like a petulant child with its neighbors over airline traffic and now wishes to branch out to anger people flowing through their community, the Whidbey Island commuters. I have a simple solution to clear up the “problem” in Mukilteo, one I’ve advocated for years — move the ferry dock somewhere else.

“But where? But where?” From casually looking around the area, I note that once proud employer NORD Door is dark and empty. The very north end of Everett’s waterfront is pretty desolate and wild, but has lots of open land that could be developed as a new, state of the art ferry/train/bus terminus with better freeway access than quaint Old Mukilteo, and with lots and lots of potential parking slots. The ferry ride might be, what, an extra 10 or 12 minutes?

If the terminal was relocated to the north Everett shoreline, then Mukilteo could easily and happily continue its headlong slide back into the 19th century, along with Snohomish and its ban on card games. Geographically, they’re pretty close, pehaps they could annex closer and closer and eventually become the city of “Can’t do that here.”

This is a town that’s been fighting itself for decades over one creaky, moldy, 75-year-old wooden building and whether or not to tear it down.

P.S. to Mukilteo: Tourists and regular traffic through town keep doors open and lights on in businesses (see Economics 101). Just ask folks who live in towns that got bypassed by freeways how that old economy is going today. And keep shooting holes in the bottom of your own boat.

Bill Downing

Everett