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Despite the federal government shutdown, the City of Mountlake Terrace continues to make progress on its federal initiatives, according to city lobbyist Jake Johnston of the Johnston Group, who spoke at Thursday’s City Council meeting.
Johnston said that Mountlake Terrace “continues to be the leader in the state of Washington on changing criteria at the federal level for transportation spending.” This ensures small and medium-sized cities have access to federal discretionary grant programs.
“We’ve been working on this for a long time, and prior to 2021, we had focused our efforts on what was known as the BUILD program, or the RAISE program,” he said. “In 2021, thanks to this city’s efforts, we actually changed the designation criteria in that program so that half of all awards starting in 2021 went to communities below 200,000 in population size.”
Before the change, no Washington city under 100,000 residents had received a RAISE grant. Since then, 12 small cities have received funding, including Shoreline, Woodinville, Bothell and Lakewood, according to Johnston.
He added that Mountlake Terrace and several partner cities are now pushing to extend those criteria to all federal transportation and housing-related grant programs. The transportation bill is up for reauthorization next year and is expected to be a key opportunity for further progress.
“Mountlake Terrace, Bothell and Shoreline kind of coordinated a statewide effort to send a letter to the entire delegation that listed what our priorities were for that bill, and kind of what we thought we wanted to see out of it,” Johnston said. “And 38 cities in the state of Washington signed it within a week to put that together. After the letter was done, we heard from other communities like Walla Walla and Moses Lake that weren’t able to get council approval to sign the letter.”
This coalition includes 40 cities across every Washington congressional district and has bipartisan support from the state’s entire federal delegation, Johnston said. U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen and U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, who both hold senior roles on key transportation committees, have backed the cities’ proposal.
However, the City’s federal funding requests this year brought mixed results. Johnston said that the City’s request for $2.5 million in congressional funding to replace the MLT Library’s roof and expand the Lake Ballinger Center was reduced to $850,000 after the “Democratic-led projects were cut by two-thirds.”
Meanwhile, the City’s latest application for a federal RAISE transportation grant was unsuccessful. According to Johnston, federal reviewers said the proposal met all scoring criteria but fell short in its benefit-cost analysis. “[It’s] the economic analysis of the grant, to make sure that if we spend this federal money, that there will be a positive economic outcome in the end,” he said. “They didn’t believe that the growth allocations that we were attesting for downtown Mountlake Terrace were possible or plausible. I’m oversimplifying the direct analysis they gave us, but they basically did not believe that we were going to grow like we intended to. And that is the challenge. If the City does decide to resubmit the grant, we’re gonna have to write the [benefit-cost analysis] in such a way that it’s ironclad in terms of its data and its presentation criteria.”
However, Johnston said that the U.S. Department of Transportation “actively encouraged” the City to resubmit their grant application with a “better kind of explanation for the numbers and the growth projections.”
Councilmember Erin Murray asked if continuing to pursue the grants is worthwhile and whether the grants would go to the “highest-ranked” projects in Washington first.
“I would say it’s a technical review until you get to the secretary’s desk, at which point it becomes a political review,” Johnston said. “So roughly, in the last cycle, they funded half of the projects that came to the desk…There are statutory requirements in terms of how these funds are supposed to be allocated to the states and kind of the guardrails around them. But clearly, [ City] staff will be making a recommendation to Council if [this is] something we would like the Council to bless moving forward or not.”
Johnston said the third week of the federal government shutdown is on track to surpass the record 35-day closure during the first Trump administration. Federal employees will miss another paycheck starting this week.
“Congress had put a lot of guardrails into the appropriations in the budget bills to make sure that in any future shutdown, any federal obligation that was incurred during the shutdown was statutorily required to be paid once the government opened up again and got back into control,” Johnston said. “So any program that is statutorily authorized right now and is obligated those funds are statutorily secure. And I’m using the word statutorily a lot tonight because [there’s] a lot of the tension right now in D.C.”
Johnston said the City Council should consider how to support vulnerable residents if federal aid and benefits are delayed, acknowledging that “these actually have legitimate human consequences.”
Johnston suggests that every councilmember should speak with other nearby cities’ councilmembers about pursuing federal funding. “Every single one of your neighbors [and] city in the state of Washington is dealing with this challenge, both with existing grant programs that have already been awarded and those terms are trying to be renegotiated, and with the potentiality of seeking future federal funds,” he said. “We don’t want to sign anything that diminishes our values as a community at the same time.”
In other agenda items:
- Deputy City Manager Carolyn Hope discussed renewing the contract with City Attorney Hillary Evans of Kenyon Disend, whose hourly rate will increase from $270 to $300 in 2026 and $315 in 2027. The rate has not gone up since 2021. Councilmembers did not vote or reach a consensus, but several expressed their concerns about costs, including Councilmember Steve Woodard and Mayor Pro Tem Bryan Wahl. The Council will vote on the contract during a future meeting.
- Hope said that the Flock license plate reader system, which has generated community controversy, is “on pause” and the Flock cameras have not been installed.
The full meeting can be viewed on the city’s YouTube channel.
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