With the Olympia Brewing Co. long gone, it’s time to appropriate its simple slogan, “It’s the water.”
It’s the water that makes where we live so special – Puget Sound, the lakes, the Snohomish, Stillaguamish and Skykomish rivers and their many tributaries. Which is why plans to increase access to the water are exciting and deserve applause and encouragement.
The city of Everett, the Port of Everett and Snohomish County are putting $750,000 toward improvements to the 10th Street Marina in Everett. The project includes creating paths, a waterfront walkway, a kayak dock, shelters, a raised sandy beach, a playground, seasonal vendor areas, a 6-foot high mound for telescopes and more parking. The waterfront walkway will offer more public access to the water than ever before.
This project complements the major redevelopment happening at the Everett marina, just south of the 10th Street Marina. While the Port Gardner Wharf condominiums are that project’s driving force, the construction will increase access to the water for everyone. Plans include an amphitheater, a pedestrian esplanade 1 1/2 miles long and 18 acres of parks and public open space.
Meanwhile, Marysville just signed a $2.2 million agreement to buy the International Forest Products mill and its 10-acre property, which is close to Ebey Slough, where the city intends to create walking trails along the dike. The city needs the land for its expanding public works facilities, but the plans include developing a trail from the city’s new Ebey Waterfront Park west of Highway 529, all the way southeast along the dike to the Sunnyside neighborhood, which the city plans to annex.
The 5.4-acre waterfront park, which was 10 years in the making and opened last summer, is the city’s only publicly-owned access to its waterfront on Ebey Slough. The park features public boat access, a short-stay moorage float, space for public fishing, walking trails and wetland restoration. Marysville city leaders since the 1940s envisioned such a park, which is exactly the kind of foresight needed today throughout Snohomish County.
Since Everett will be conducting a survey about what people want to see in the way of parks and open spaces this year, perhaps the time has come to resurrect the city’s ambitious and wonderful plan to establish a continuous system of trails and parks around Everett’s entire peninsula …
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