By Janice Podsada
Herald Writer
MUKILTEO — Pat Burns, 54, doesn’t play a lick of golf, but if it’s Tuesday or it’s raining or it’s National-You-Name-It day, he can be found hitchhiking a ride on a golf cart at the Harbour Pointe Golf Course in Mukilteo.
Burns, a Georgia resident, admits he’ll use any excuse to spend vacations in Mukilteo, where his 58-year-old brother Bill lives, works, plays golf and lets him ride on the passenger side of the electric cart.
Pat Burns, an Edmonds High School graduate, wants to come home to Snohomish County. If that should occur, he’ll look for a home in Mukilteo, specifically Harbour Pointe, where the shopping center and the golf course are the local attractions.
"I don’t see myself living in Old Towne," he said, referring to Mukilteo’s oldest neighborhood, which overlooks a ferry landing built in the 1930s and a century-old lighthouse.
Shiny and new, the Harbour Pointe area is nothing like Old Towne.
Once you pass Harbour Pointe Boulevard on Mukilteo Speedway — Highway 525 — everything looks new, even the trees. There’s the new Walgreens, the new Mukilteo library, the new landscaped boulevards, the new townhouses and new condominiums.
In 1991, the city of Mukilteo annexed Harbour Pointe, a 2,300-acre planned community. The move doubled the city’s size and population and increased revenues. Overnight, Mukilteo had a business tax base.
But in the first few years after the annexation, Harbour Pointe residents were regarded as the new kids on the block, said Tracie Gan, owner of Pasta Ta Go-Go, which opened in the Harbour Pointe shopping center in March.
However, rivalries between old and new Mukilteo never really materialized, said Gan, who lives and works in Harbour Pointe.
"At first it was, ‘Oh you’re the newcomers.’ But it’s been enough years — we’re all part of Mukilteo."
The two parts of town mix freely at the Mukilteo YMCA, the city’s common ground.
"Everyone in Mukilteo belongs to the Y — otherwise, you’re not a Mukiltean," Gan said.
Meredith Wegley, an 18-year-old student at Kamiak High School and a resident of Harbour Pointe, said that she and her sister, Annemarie, 8, enjoy partaking of the best of both worlds: cafes in Old Towne and Harbour Pointe.
You can call Herald Writer Janice Podsada at 425-339-3029 or send e-mail to podsada@heraldnet.com.
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