MUKILTEO – Only about 10 percent of the city of Mukilteo is undeveloped, and the battle is on over whether to keep it that way.
“As you pave over a watershed, I think it’s important that the buffers are as big as we can possibly make them,” said resident Bill Gregerson.
Gregerson is keeping tabs on city plans to increase the area around streams and wetlands that is off-limits to development. Opponents include developers and the Boeing Co., which owns land in the Picnic Point Creek watershed.
The wetland ordinance “goes too far, considering that the impacts far outweigh the gains, and the city’s own analysis shows that current buffers are protecting wetland water quality,” Rich White, Boeing manager for local government relations, wrote in a letter to the city.
“The builders would like to see less buffer; the environmentalists would like to see bigger buffers. I think the city has come up with a compromise,” Mukilteo Planning Commission member Tom McGrath said at a meeting Thursday.
Mukilteo has 13 streams and about 100 areas classified as wetlands.
The city’s plan would increase the protected area around wetlands from 100 feet to 160 feet, and the buffer around streams from 25 feet or less to up to 150 feet. It would give the city the authority to increase the buffers beyond that if it determined such action was warranted.
State standards call for buffers of up to 300 feet for wetlands and 225 feet for the types of streams found in Mukilteo. The city could have proposed expanding the buffers up to those limits.
Of particular importance, Gregerson said, are the larger watersheds of Japanese Gulch, Big Gulch and Picnic Point Creek. They are salmon streams, and the undeveloped portions are upstream from public open space, he said. “These three watersheds have a lot of value to the public.”
Another part of the city’s proposal would allow a property owner to build 50 percent closer to a stream in exchange for opening a culvert stream to daylight.
The state is requiring cities and counties by Sept. 1 to at least be in the process of updating their laws on streams, wetlands and wildlife, said Heather McCartney, Mukilteo planning director. The new laws must either conform to state standards or use science to justify their conclusions, she said.
The city hired Pentec Environmental of Edmonds to do the study, which measured the effects of different buffers on streams and wetlands. Its conclusions are subject to interpretation, McCartney said.
The Planning Commission voted to recommend approval of both plans to the City Council. No date has been set for the council to consider the plans. The changes will not affect developed lots, except in cases of add-ons or redevelopment.
The stream plan would affect 67 lots in the city, and the wetland plan would affect 37 lots.
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