SPECIAL REPORT City vs Sewer District II - A Brief History of Lake Stevens Local Government

We turn back time to 1960 - the year Frontier Village debuted as a commercial center and the city and the sewer district emerged as local gov entities

In part one of this report, we told you about the city and the sewer district’s contentious legal battle that is spilling over into lawsuits, letter-sending campaigns, vitriolic public meetings and social media back-and-forths. We will pick up with more on the legal battle and the battle of words in coming days (we expect three more installments of this series) but today we turn back the clock to 1960 and before — if you wanna get caught up on our earlier reporting follow the link to part one at the bottom of the story. Thank you as always for reading.

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LAKE STEVENS - Today, the Lake Stevens Sewer District is a behemoth of a public entity… a complex network of real estate, hardware and infrastructure valued at over $100 million dollars net present value. 

Its mission: to provide sewer services to the Lake Stevens urban growth area. 

In practice, the sewer system itself relies on a complex map of 126 miles of piping powered by gravity augmented by 30 lift stations. 

Lift stations are required to convey flow through the hilly topography of the service area, which ranges from near sea level at the Ebey Slough outflow, to above 400 feet in several areas, including near Lake Stevens High School and along SR-9 near the northern edge of the service area. 

This system of pipes and lift stations ultimately conveys wastewater from around the perimeter of Lake Stevens, west to the sewer district’s Sunnyside treatment plant, and out to the Snohomish River and ultimately the Puget Sound via the Ebey Slough. 

This system described above, however, wasn’t built in a day. In fact, the Lake Stevens Sewer District actually predates the City of Lake Stevens.

 

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Government In Bloom

The origin story of this special purpose district begins when the water quality in Lake Stevens deteriorated beyond public acceptance during the summer of 1955. 

That summer, a bloom of blue-green algae appeared along the western shore of the lake accompanied by an unpleasant odor. 

A pollution committee was formed to develop solutions for the deteriorating water quality. 

The committee concluded that the underlying strata of hardpan found in the lake's drainage basin made the on-site sewage disposal systems in the area of the lake ineffective, resulting in raw sewage discharge directly into the lake and tributary streams.