MOUNTLAKE TERRACE — Mountlake Terrace Public Works Director Gary Schimek led a public forum on Wednesday at City Hall to discuss regional wastewater management and provide updates for community members on projects and rates.
The forum included insight from former and current interim City of Edmonds Public Works Director Phil Williams, City of Everett Public Works Director Ryan Sass and Alderwood Water & Wastewater District General Manager John McClellan.
Mountlake Terrace is in the midst of creating a 50-year plan for its water and sewer system, figuring out how to manage water supplies amid a drought and how to find capacity for wastewater with an increasing population, Schimek said, giving context to the evening.
“Those are some big issues,” he said. “And then you have climate change, aging infrastructure. So we have our hands full when looking at this.”
Many of the pipes in the area are over 50 years old, he said, noting that in the next 10-15 years, the lines risk breaking.
Schimek handed the mic to Sass, who explained Everett’s regional water system, which supplies three quarters of Snohomish County.
The utility service runs on a cost recovery model, Sass said, meaning that there’s a cost to provide service, and the municipality recovers those costs through rates.
“We’ve transitioned from a time of historically low inflation to the return of inflation coming out of COVID,” he said, pointing to a graph of increasing rates over the past few years.
From 2020 to 2024, construction costs increased 39%, with another 5% added through 2025, and upcoming projects include massive construction, Sass said.
One major project includes replacing the currently 100-year-old reservoir, in addition to updating the water filtration plant that processes an average of 50 million gallons a day for the 670,000 people in the county it serves.
To try to relieve some pressure on ratepayer costs, Sass said some projects have been pushed years down the line.
The Alderwood wastewater district serves over 300,000 people throughout southwest Snohomish County, McClellan said. The district has nearly 700 miles of water lines and 500 miles of sewer lines, and as populations continue to grow, the district needs to make more connections to the system.
“We’ve seen on the order of 10 to 20 miles of new water and sewer mains installed in our district every year for literally decades,” he said. “That’s how fast our area is growing.”
Steel reservoirs hold about 90 million gallons throughout the system, he said, which positions the group to serve the continued growth in the coming years.
Williams continued the conversation by explaining how Edmonds’ wastewater treatment facility serves Montlake Terrace and parts of Shoreline.
In 2018, the city decided to retire its old incinerator used in the facility and began the hunt to find new, more environmentally friendly technology to replace the system with, he said.
The department ended up choosing a gasification technology created by a Pennsylvania company, Ecoremedy. Through the state’s Energy Savings Performance Contracting Program, Edmonds moved forward with contracting Ecoremedy to build out the new technology in the existing wastewater treatment plant.
In April, Ecoremedy was gearing up to start its 6-month trial of running the system to collect data and train public works staff.
“We’re still trying to make it run the way it was intended to run,” Williams said on Wednesday.
The initial contract to implement the new system was $26 million, Williams said, and while the groups are still troubleshooting how to get the technology operational, the public works department has been having to haul biosolids to a landfill in Oregon.
“It’s a very expensive project. It does affect our rates, just like it will the rates from our partners, Mountlake Terrace, Olympic View and Shoreline,” he said.
Schimek wrapped up the meeting by reiterating that Mountlake Terrance is a part of multiple regional entities, and that work each group does ripples through the area and inevitably affects the rates residents pay.
“We are not making profit,” he said. “Our goal is to be as efficient as possible, but we are not making profit. This is what it costs to provide.”
Eliza Aronson: 425-339-3434; eliza.aronson@heraldnet.com; X: @ElizaAronson.
Eliza’s stories are supported by the Herald’s Environmental and Climate Reporting Fund.
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