The Mountlake Terrace City Council, at its April 4 regular business meeting, approved the 2022 Tour de Terrace festival agreement between the City of Mountlake Terrace and event sponsors. The council also received updates from the Snohomish Health District and the city’s state and federal lobbyists, and agreed to form a committee to examine a potential annexation agreement with South County Fire for a regional fire authority.

Tour de Terrace is scheduled for the weekend of July 22-24, which is a week earlier than the event is traditionally held due to the carnival vendor’s availability.

The Tour de Terrace Organization will offer the same events as it did in 2019 – the last year the festival took place prior to the COVID 19 pandemic – including a beer garden, carnival, classic car show, fireworks display, live music, pancake breakfast, parade, street fair and a 5K fun run/walk.

Under the agreement, the city will contribute police security at the parade and festival, park maintenance services to repair the fields used and light rental, along with public works services for the placement of event banners, barricades and street closures in support of the parade and 5K run/walk.

The agreement also includes provisions for complying with any applicable Washington state regulations or guidelines pertaining to COVID-19, if any changes should be instituted before the event is held. The council had previously approved a 2022 lodging tax allocation of $15,000 to the Tour de Terrace Organization for the planned festival.

Snohomish Health District staff provided the council with an update. The district has continued its collaborations throughout the past year with local, regional and state partners “to control the spread and mitigate the impacts of COVID across Snohomish County,” Interim Deputy Administrative Officer Pam Aguilar noted. Efforts included providing residents with testing, access to immunizations, and working with schools in doing case investigation, contact tracing and technical assistance tasks to protect local communities.

Ongoing COVID-19 efforts are being migrated into regular disease response work rather than continuing as a stand-alone incident command structure. The district is working to update its website and also to ensure more sustainable operations for its COVID-19 work. Those efforts are now focused on preserving hospital capacity along with “supporting the health care system and providers as they become the go-to for all vaccines and testings,” Aguilar said.

Additionally, the health district has continued to perform routine public health functions including access to vital records, various prevention services and environmental public health services. Last year, she added, “the Washington State Legislature made significant investments in foundational public health services,” which greatly increased the capacity to deliver those services statewide.

Many types of communicable disease levels either remained the same or slightly declined in 2021 when compared to previous years. “However,” Aguilar said, “it remains to be seen how much this is due to people not seeking health care due to COVID impacts or if there is truly a decline in some diseases.” It was also noted that there has been an increase in syphilis cases reported in Snohomish County, as well as across the nation, and the health district has recently added two more disease intervention specialists to help address the issue.

The district’s two primary areas of focus for preventing or reducing chronic disease and injury remain focused on drug overdoses and youth suicides.

“The number of residents experiencing overdoses has sadly increased in the last few years,” she said. “Right now drug overdose deaths appear to be relatively flat compared to 2020, but those are still preliminary.” There has been a rise in the number of synthetic opioid overdoses that Aguilar attributed largely to fentanyl and she noted that data from 2021 is currently incomplete.

Health district staff have been working on an initiative to digitize all of the district’s old paper records with the eventual goal of making those all available to the public online, which will also increase transparency.

Additional recent efforts include preparing to administer an updated community health assessment that gathers and analyzes data in order to help address ongoing, critical public health issues. That process helps identify and refine a list of two to three key issues impacting the health of Snohomish County residents, which are then used to develop a community health improvement plan that is utilized for the next three to five years. The last such assessment took place in 2018 and identified suicide prevention, mental health and substance use, and housing as key issues.

The district has also put together a year-long outreach campaign for this year titled “ABCs for Healthy Kids,” in which each letter of the alphabet corresponds to a public health message that includes two weeks of materials and activities for kids planned around each of the topics.

In other business, the council heard from federal lobbyist Jake Johnston of the Johnston Group on its 2022 legislative agenda. He highlighted some recent accomplishments the city has made at the federal level over the past year, adding, “I think the city had a tremendous year both on (the) policy front and on a funding front.”

Those included obtaining $2 million in funds earmarked to support the City of Mountlake Terrace’s Transit Connection Corridor Project that will construct a pedestrian plaza next to the new light rail station and also add well-lit, paved trails throughout Veterans Memorial Park.

“We also got the last bit of federal funding in for the Ballinger Park (restoration) project, bringing the federal investment in that project to just north of $4.5 million,” Johnston noted. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is partnering with the city on the project that includes a substantial ecological restoration component for the portion of Hall Creek that runs through Ballinger Park, together with the park’s ponds and wetland areas.

The City of Mountlake Terrace also worked with cities in Washington and Oregon to lobby for federal competitive grant programs that address infrastructure and transportation needs to include a set-aside for medium-sized cities. Those grant funding programs have traditionally been set up to favor larger cities or Census-defined rural communities, which then leaves medium-sized cities — including Mountlake Terrace — to compete against larger cities such as Seattle and Portland for accessing federal resources.

Johnston said that “while we didn’t get exactly what we wanted last year” in terms of federal legislation proposed for such a set-aside, progress has been made to help address the issue. He noted that some programs in the recently enacted infrastructure bill contain a set aside for medium-sized cities with population sizes between 10,000-75,000 people. These include a 25% set-aside for such cities in the bill’s new Community Transportation Grant program and a similar set aside of 10% for its Community Climate grant program.

“It’s a start, it’s not all transportation programs, it’s not everything we wanted,” Johnston said. “But it’s the first time that the federal government has acknowledged cities of this size need a specific carve-out of federal dollars in order to have access to these grant programs – so we’re really excited to build from that moving forward.”

“The key part of our agenda moving into the next year is to continue to build partnerships at the federal level and the city for funding opportunities,” he added. “There are a tremendous number of federal grant programs that we’re going to be chasing this year. We’re going to be pursuing more earmark support for the Main Street (Revitalization) Project,” along with bridging the transition to U.S. Rep. Susan DelBene, of the redrawn 1st Congressional District, who will represent Mountlake Terrace moving forward after last year’s state redistricting efforts. The city had previously been represented by the 2nd Congressional District for the past decade.

State lobbyist Shelly Helder of Gordon Thomas Honeywell Governmental Affairs updated the council on the Washington State Legislature’s recently concluded 2022 legislative session. City lobbying efforts during the 60-day session included working to advance its legislative priorities at the state level, continuing to raise awareness for the Main Street Revitalization Project, supporting investments in affordable housing and also providing utility assistance relief for residents affected by the pandemic.

Most significant was passage of the Move Ahead Washington transportation revenue package, which commits $17 billion for making significant transportation investments over the next 16 years. It will finance several programs that provide funding grants for local infrastructure projects throughout the state and it also authorizes several new tools for local governments in order to increase their revenues for transportation purposes.

In addition, the supplemental transportation and capital budgets approved included allocations to three grant programs that the City of Mountlake Terrace can apply for to help with funding various components of the Main Street Revitalization Project. She also noted that the capital budget approved funding for critical investments in grant programs to help address housing and homelessness, behavioral health and local infrastructure.

Helder noted that, due to redistricting, Mountlake Terrace will be contained exclusively in the 32nd Legislative District moving forward. It had been divided between both the 1st and 32nd Districts for the past decade. Looking ahead, she recommended the city council determine its state legislative priorities for the 2023-24 biennium by this fall before the next legislative session that begins in January 2023.

The council approved a raft of items on its consent calendar including a work order with Osborn Consulting, Inc. to conduct an analysis of flooding, culverts and removing fish barriers along Hall Creek. The survey is intended to help inform efforts to reduce the risk and frequency of the creek’s flooding in Mountlake Terrace and also to determine where barriers to migrating fish passage could be safely removed. In addition, it will develop planning-level cost estimates for potential repair or replacement of culverts and to address problem areas identified.

Conducting the analysis requires special engineering skills and tasks such as hydrologic and hydraulic modeling that city staff is unable to carry out. Doing so will assist the city in making cost-effective decisions for future culvert replacement and related stormwater capital improvement projects.

The city’s contract for those services is drawn up as a “work order,” with a not-to-exceed cost of nearly $148,500, under a contract the council previously approved for on-call stormwater engineering services. The analysis is anticipated to be completed by the end of this October.

It also approved an amendment to the professional services agreement with ARC Architects, Inc. The amendment will provide contracting, coordination and consultant fees needed for services related to closing out the Mountlake Terrace Civic Campus redevelopment project. It includes time spent by ARC Architects to perform inspection and construction administration services above and beyond the base services agreement, along with previously approved amendments for such services.

In other business, the council agreed to form a three-person committee to examine a potential annexation agreement with South County Fire for a Regional Fire Authority (RFA). Councilmembers Laura Sonmore, Doug McCardle and Steve Woodard will serve on the committee, which will discuss various options and associated costs.

The City of Mountlake Terrace has been contracting with South County Fire to provide it with various fire and emergency medical services since 2005.

Under terms of the 20-year interlocal agreement, which expires in January 2025, South County Fire provides staffing for the city’s Fire Station 19, which is located next to the Civic Campus. The city pays for staffing the station 24 hours per day with a fire captain, a firefighter/paramedic, and a firefighter/emergency medical technician. It also helps fund costs associated with the agency providing the city with a designated fire marshal, overhead and a fleet fund for replacing medic unit and fire truck equipment.

Last year the city’s costs under the agreement were forecasted to be approximately $3 million. The ongoing expense is paid for by a voter-approved EMS Levy and also from the city’s general fund.

“The challenge we have is this contract is coming to an end and we need to figure out next steps,” City Manager Scott Hugill said.

“We have a few options to consider,” he added. “We can try and form our own fire department but that’s going to be very expensive. We can partner with Brier and Edmonds that also contract with the RFA for fire districts and form a multi-city fire district, which is possible but we probably won’t be able to do it any less expensive than the RFA.”

In addition, “We can contract with someone other than the RFA, for example, City of Shoreline – that’s what the Town of Woodway does, but it has some challenges in terms of dispatch,” Hugill said, adding that potentially contracting with the City of Bothell would present similar dispatch challenges.

A fourth option is seeking voter approval of annexation into the RFA. However, Hugill noted that South County Fire’s current levy rate for its RFA “is more than we are currently paying” under the city’s existing interlocal agreement with the agency.

“So if we’re going to annex, we need to talk to voters about how we can offset that cost and how we would go about doing that,” he added. “Fortunately we’ve got a couple of years to go through that process, but I wouldn’t want to take it down to the wire – in case voters don’t approve it and we’re up against the wire and have very limited choices.”

Therefore, he suggested the council form a three-person committee, similar to what is required by state law of cities seeking to annex with an RFA, in order to further evaluate the city’s options well in advance of the current agreement’s expiration in early 2025.

“Just running the math, if we look at what South County Fire would charge us (under its current RFA Levy rate), I believe it’s in the magnitude of over $5 million,” Hugill told councilmembers, whereas “we pay about $3 million right now. If voters annex into the RFA: We can drop their EMS Levy, we can drop their taxes by what we contribute from the general fund, we can further lower our costs because we’ll no longer have to pay Snohomish County Dispatch for fire dispatch, but that’s still not enough of a reduction to overcome $5 million.”

He asked that the three-person committee formed help to provide him and the rest of the council with guidance and further input on the four choices available moving forward. Both Sonmore and McCardle previously served on a similar council committee that examined annexation with the RFA.

— By Nathan Blackwell