King County, invoking eminent domain as its authority, plans to impose a huge sewage plant upon one of two sites in Snohomish County. One of those sites is in our small town of Edmonds, which already has two sewage plants. A third sewage plant, this one four times larger than the one in our town center, would make us the only city in the state of Washington with three.
Setting aside the likelihood that King County’s invocation of eminent domain may be unconstitutional, King County hasn’t even abided by the criteria it set up to guide its choice of sites. By those same criteria, the Edmonds site is several acres too small. The site is in the midst of a residential area, not an industrial one. It is on a bluff, near which there have recently been several slides: burrowing into it on a scale necessary to build the plant would add to potential instability. It overlooks the Sound, into which a breakdown would send tons of untreated human waste into an already challenged shoreline ecology. The miles of piping needed to carry untreated waste to the site would require pumping stations in residential and school areas of several other cities, where breakdowns would turn whole neighborhoods and school districts into pest holes with serious disease potential.
The list of King County’s ignoring of its own criteria is longer than this, but there are other serious points to be made: The site borders our ferry landing and would destroy our tourist economy. It would violate the Growth Management Act. With two sewage plants already installed, we serve the region with more than our share. Another Edmonds sewage plant, especially one so visible as this, would devalue residential property on a scale never imagined. Public facilities pay no taxes, hence, in addition to revenues lost through property devaluation and decline of tourism, we would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars that would otherwise come into our city treasury from residential development of that site.
Recently, citizens crowded a meeting room at the Edmonds Library to rally against this unfriendly usurpation of the rights of our citizens by a sister county. And we resolved to fight our way through the Legislature and on to the Washington state Supreme Court, if necessary, to prevent the installation of another sewage plant in Edmonds.
Edmonds
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