Sewer District's Quarter Mil Manager Explains Why Salon Michelle Was Forced Out of Business

Michelle Myers' 24-year-run operating Lake Stevens' premiere salon -- and the only business with a view of the lake comes to an abrupt close

“They basically took my retirement from me.” 

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TEXAS - Dispisable. Used. That’s how Lake Stevens resident Michelle Myers feels these days, as she spends 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. 

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 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. 

In 2021, Low was an elected public servant on a $14k annual salary. But she woke up January 1, 2024 making damn near a cool quarter mil a year.

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: