If Snohomish County doesn’t get moving on the Brightwater sewage treatment plant, King County wants the state to penalize everyone who lives in the county by taking away millions of dollars for roads, police, parks and other county services.
King County also threatens to slap a building moratorium on south Snohomish County that would freeze the building of all new homes and anything else that requires a sewer hookup.
Mill Creek, Mountlake Terrace, Bothell, Brier and Woodway especially will suffer if Snohomish County doesn’t start issuing critical permits, according to a letter from King County Executive Ron Sims.
And if all those threats don’t get things moving, Snohomish County will be sued by its neighbor to the south.
Sims and the King County Council on Wednesday chastised the Snohomish County Council and County Executive Aaron Reardon, claiming elected officials here are creating roadblocks that could delay the opening of the plant.
“Regionalism requires the best in all of us,” the King County letter reads. “Jurisdictions which receive the benefits of regional facilities should be willing to host their fair share of regional facilities, along with their attendant impacts, as long as they are reasonably mitigated.”
Both counties agree that King County won the right to put the $1.48 billion plant at Highway 9 and Highway 522 in the rural Maltby area. They’re still arguing over how much oversight Snohomish County has over the permit process.
If Snohomish County doesn’t cooperate, King County attorneys will push Gov. Christine Gregoire to strip away millions of dollars that Snohomish County gets from gasoline, sales, liquor and other taxes.
“Why is Ron (Sims) hellbent on building this on Highway 9 on top of seismic faults?” asked Jeff Sax, the Snohomish County councilman whose district includes the Brightwater site. “If it’s that important to him, maybe he should be up here talking to us instead of writing us letters.”
Sims apparently has forgotten that representative democracy requires that the Snohomish County Council have a say over building Brightwater, Sax said.
Without that, people who will soon have a sewer treatment plant in their back yards would be left out of the process, he said.
Snohomish County isn’t going to be intimidated by Sims. “It’s a shallow threat,” Sax said.
Council Chairman Gary Nelson pointed to a recent court ruling that said Snohomish County has oversight over Brightwater.
And the governor, an attorney, is unlikely to interpret the facts as King County has chosen to present them, Nelson said.
“Much of that is a fabrication and a distortion of what has been happening,” Nelson said. “Gov. Gregoire is smarter than that.”
Reardon declined to comment Thursday until he’d had a chance to review the matter.
Brightwater construction must start this year if it’s going to open by 2010, said Kurt Triplett, Sims’ chief of staff. That’s when King County will reach capacity at its two existing sewage treatment plants.
“It’s a high-stakes game, and we don’t want to be here,” Triplett said. There’s no sense of urgency on Snohomish County’s part, he said, so “we feel we’re running out of options.”
The sewer system, which takes sewage from south Snohomish County, already sends raw sewage into Lake Washington during heavy rains, he said. If that didn’t happen, the sewage would back up into people’s homes.
King County will sue Snohomish County next week if the County Council doesn’t indicate that it’s willing to cooperate, Triplett said. There are several types of lawsuits King County could file, he said.
King County also plans to challenge two ordinances the Snohomish County Council adopted in April that regulate earthquake safety and odor control at sewer treatment plants, Triplett said.
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