Last Days of a District: 80K on a Truck, Quarter Mil for Manager — but Curtains for Salon Michelle

With just months left in power, sewer leadership pushed through last-second 36% admin raises, bought a tricked out F-15O Lightning & evicted a local biz instead of passing decision to new landlord

(Updated Friday 4:02 pm)

TEXAS - Disposable. Used.

That’s how Lake Stevens resident Michelle Myers feels these days.

She’s spending unexpected idle time with family in Texas, just a month after the Lake Stevens Sewer District elected to terminate the lease for Myers’ Salon Michelle - the popular LS salon and spa whose 24-year-run on the second story of the Vernon Road Building came to an abrupt end recently.

Why the district chose to end a local business when the city was mere months away from assuming longterm landlord duties over the lease for the popular LS-owned biz is unclear.

Michelle Myers can’t speak to the facts. But she knows how it feels.

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“They basically took my retirement from me.” 

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J425 noticed that Salon Michelle was no longer in existence while prepping a status update on the ongoing merger negotiations between the City of Lake Stevens and the district.

We’d last checked the proceedings late Fall and found that everything seemed copacetic. Three years of expensive, contentious legal squabbling had apparently come to a close. 

Best of all, the city and the district had, according to documents shared during a November Utility Committee meeting, agreed in principle on a merger schedule.

LAVISH RAISES

In 2021, Mariah Low was an elected sewer commissioner on a $14k annual salary.

She stepped down from her role in Fall 2021. A few days later, the district’s highest-paid job opened up.

Low was quickly installed as GM on a temporary basis. Salary: $142k.

Just over two years later, the same role is now paid a cool quarter mil a year base salary — based on a last-second slate of raises pushed through with little or no public visibility.

Per joint discussions in November, the two public entities agreed on a timeline that would see the city fully adopt the sewer district before the end of this calendar year, ending what had at times been an extremely adversarial and outsized battle between the cash-rich special purpose district and one of the state’s fastest growing municipalities. 

That was before the sewer district’s December to Remember, a month-long streak of tone-deaf, we-don’t gotta-explain-shit-to-any-of-you, organizational me-firstery unparalleled in J425’s two decades of working in and covering local politics.

If you think callously closing down the local small business icon with arguably the biggest rolodex in Lake Stevens is a tough act to follow: here, hold my Celcius Peach Vibe: