Shoreline city officials are waiting to hear what the Snohomish County Council will decide when it comes to the future of Point Wells – a roughly 100-acre site that could be rezoned for more than 1,000 residential condominiums.
Although the site is located within Snohomish County, both Shoreline and the town of Woodway have expressed interest in annexing the area since Paramount Petroleum, the current property owner, announced an intention to redevelop the site in May 2007.
Before a decision to change the site’s zoning designation to support a residential use can be made by the county, an Environmental Impact Statement must be completed and released.
A review originally scheduled in 2007-2008 was pushed back to 2008-2009 so the county would have more time to consider the change.
“Snohomish County was late getting started on the EIS,” Shoreline senior planner Steve Cohn said. “We were told it won’t be ready until December 2008.”
Point Wells is the only potential annexation for the city, according to Cohn.
When the EIS is released, Shoreline officials will check for impacts and mitigations for Shoreline. Currently, the only road to Point Wells is through Shoreline and the area is serviced by Shoreline Police and Fire departments.
“We know that traffic is going to be a large impact and we’ve wanted to see how much traffic would be produced,” Cohn said. “The EIS could propose a number of things … we just have to wait and see.”
Growth management
City leaders in Shoreline may not be rushing the issue, while a few miles away in unincorporated areas surrounding Lynnwood, Mukilteo and Mill Creek, the discussions surrounding potential annexations feel more urgent.
Since 1990, in King County alone, the population rose by some 400,000 people. And it’s projected to jump again by more than 700,000 in the next 30 years, according to the state’s 2040 forecast.
“This all started because the counties and the cities were not required to plan together,” Snohomish County Planning and Development Services director Craig Ladiser said. “The Growth Management Act was passed by the Legislature in 1995 and it did a couple of key things. It forced us to cooperate and it forced us to plan around our infrastructure: Where are all these people going to live and work, and do we have the capacity to accommodate them?”
The GMA requires cities and counties to look at growth strategically — to assess infrastructure needs against population forecasts and keep current comprehensive plans, detailing how and where growth will occur and what it will look like.
The cities are responsible for planning and incorporating land within their Municipal Urban Growth Areas (MUGAs), while the counties control development in until the land is annexed
But there’s no mandate in the law forcing cities and counties to follow the same standards.
Annexation is the one tool cities have to protect the integrity of their borders, but the burden of extending services to thousands of new residents is often cost prohibitive. The Legislature offered cities a carrot in 2006 to help cover the cost of incorporating new residents. Cities in Snohomish, King, Pierce and Kitsap counties that initiate annexations resulting in a minimum of 10,000 new residents will capture 0.1 percent of the state’s sales tax collections from those cities for 10 years. The offer is set to expire in 2010, but lawmakers expect a proposal from King County to extend the deadline.
Four cities in Snohomish County — Lynnwood, Bothell, Marysville and Mukilteo — are pursuing annexations that qualify for the temporary tax incentive. But even with help from the state, the process of adding new residents and extending services is expensive.
“I don’t think the tax incentive will be enough in the end,” Snohomish County Sheriff John Lovick said. “The cities are doing a 2-step dance. You have the state holding out this carrot, but, at the same time, the cities are realizing that 0.1 percent isn’t going to touch their expenses.”
Public safety
With the deadline fast approaching, cities are already working with the county on strategic plans to transition services, such as fire and law enforcement. In some cases, the Sheriff’s Office and fire districts will contract service out temporarily. But there will come a point that bridge contracts won’t be effective.
The Sheriff’s Office has 298 commissioned deputies serving 318,000 unincorporated residents.
“We still have an obligation to our county residents,” Lovick said. “We could easily find ourselves overextended if every city asks us to fill their gap in law enforcement. It will never be like King County, where they’ve stopped investigating property crimes less than $10,000, but we have to be smart in how we approach this.”
The county will lose approximately $18.8 million from taxes and other revenue sources if all four annexations are approved by a simple majority of voters in the effected areas. County leaders have pledged their support to the Sheriff’s Office in the face of falling revenue, but there’s concern that vacant positions will not be filled.
“We’ll have to streamline operations and that’s scary for everyone who works here,” Ladiser said. “The GMA tells us very clearly what our responsibilities are and how we go about managing growth. Unfortunately, it does not tell us how to implement those things fairly or equitably.”
Economic slowdown
The financial side effects will reach beyond the counties into cities where large-scale annexations aren’t an option.
Mill Creek Mayor Terry Ryan wants the county — not residents — to be accountable for substandard development in the city’s growth area.
“That won’t happen if the county runs out of money,” Ryan said. “They’ve done such a poor job developing the east-west corridor of 164th Street that we can’t possibly afford to annex there without major assistance.”
State Rep. and former Kirkland City Councilman Larry Springer drafted legislation two years ago that would have extended cities’ development standards to their growth areas, but opponents from the counties twice killed House Bill 2045 before it came to a vote in 2007 and 2008.
“How can you ask people to submit to a city that does not represent them?” Ladiser asked. “The real issue is that the urban areas are feeling tremendous pressure from growth and the cities want to control their densities.”
A year ago, the county’s planning department was getting 30 permit applications a month for residential subdivisions. Since January, however, the county has received only nine applications,
“We’ve overbuilt, and it’s an opportunity for us to step back and learn from what’s happened,” Ladiser said. “The problem is predictability. If people could predict that the house they move into today will have a new one next door in five years, this process wouldn’t feel so bad. We need to find a way to get people actively engaged in land use and planning for future land use so these decisions don’t come as a surprise.”
Shoreline/Lake Forest Park reporter Amy Daybert contributed to this story.
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