by David Mendez

The Shoreline City Council on Monday night weighed an update to the city’s drainage code, as a water district serving neighboring cities is asking for more protections to a local water source. No decision was made on Monday, but city staff will incorporate the council’s discussion into its next proposal, which will be up for an approval vote later this month.

Olympic View Water & Sewage District is a special purpose utility district that serves water to Edmonds and Woodway, as well as parts of unincorporated Snohomish County. Olympic View has been asking Shoreline to put new protections in place over the Deer Creek Wellhead Protection Area, at the potential expense of landowners and housing developers.

Up a creek

The Deer Creek Wellhead is a spring-fed stream, largely within Snohomish County, that provides about 40 percent of the Olympic View district’s water supply. A portion of the wellhead’s buffer area stretches down into Shoreline city limits, across both sides of Aurora Avenue. About 45 properties in city limits — including 42 homes and 3 properties zoned as “mixed business” — fall in the buffer zone.

In December the city adopted an ordinance amending its Critical Areas code, intended to protect important environmental resources and water sources. That ordinance didn’t designate Deer Creek as a critical aquifer recharge area, or CARA, which Olympic View wanted. A CARA designation effectively signals that a governing agency will take strict steps to protect the area’s ground water from contamination.

“It’s important to recognize what protections are typically included in a critical aquifer recharge area framework that are not addressed by a stormwater code,” Olympic View General Manager Bob Danson told the council, including land use protections, early notice for developers and requirements for storing and handling contaminants. “Without those elements, this proposal does not address land use risks in a durable way.”

Per the city’s December report, “City staff do not believe the buffer of the wellhead protection area meets the definition of a critical area and do not believe the critical areas code is the correct tool to address Olympic View’s concerns.”

Instead of giving the buffer zone a CARA designation, city staff wanted to update the city’s stormwater code to address the district’s requests around water quality. 

The Considerations

In 2023, Olympic View updated its Watershed Plan, where it established water supply protection guidelines for district staff, agencies with jurisdiction over land use in its service area and the general public. The guidelines seek to prohibit land uses that would risk contaminating the water supply, including some that aren’t expected to be issues in Shoreline, like new onsite sewage disposal systems, mining, wood treatment and landfills. It also recommends a handful of regulations for any new development in watershed protection areas.

While the city believes it generally meets Olympic View’s requests, it notes some areas of difference. Staff recommend against requiring hydrologic impact reports for all developments in the area, and they don't want to ban the use of underground injection wells within the area. Generally used for stormwater management along roads and in parking lots and to collect roof runoff, UIWs are shallow structures used to let liquids drain from the surface to the dirt and rocks that exist a few feet below ground-level. Olympic View believes such structures could lead to aquifer pollution.

City staff said that Olympic View’s main pollution concern is PFAS, long-lasting “forever chemicals” that have been pervasive in consumer and industry products since the 1940s and can find their way into water sources. According to the EPA, PFAS can increase cancer risks, weaken immune systems, interfere with natural hormones, cause developmental defects in children and decrease fertility. 

The city believes that banning all underground injection wells would effectively shift PFAS contamination from one area to another. In this case, the pollution would be prevented from seeping into the soil and instead allowed to flow into Lake Ballinger, McAleer Creek and, ultimately, Lake Washington. 

“The threat to humans that those PFAS presented has not been reduced, just moved to other sources,” staff wrote in Monday’s report. “Given that organic soils are known to sequester PFAS, staff suggest that discharging into the ground is a less environmentally impactful option compared to directly discharging it to surface waters.”

Bob Danson, the Olympic View general manager, disagreed with that assessment.

“Infiltration does not remove contaminants. It transfers them to the subsurface where they enter the drinking water aquifer,” Danson said. 

What’s next

Members of the city council seemed inclined to an idea spearheaded by Councilmember Keith Scully: make sure that Shoreline is doing what its neighbors are doing over the same water source.

“I don’t want to rewrite our whole code. Just make it look like Edmonds,” Scully said. “I want to achieve the same level of protection that Edmonds has, so there’s not a jurisdictional boundary to how we protect drinking water.” He also cautioned staff to ensure that the ordinance’s next iteration doesn’t create permitting delays for housing or commercial developments.

Councilmember Annette Ademasu asked staff to include a few options going forward to create language identifying specific land uses that could present contamination risks, as well as language that ensures applicants for certain permits describe how they will mitigate and contain water contamination risks.

As far as he and his colleagues on the dais were concerned, Councilmember Chris Roberts seemed to sum up the discussion fairly well.

“We’re fighting over the last inch, it seems like,” Roberts concluded.

The city council is scheduled to make a decision on the wastewater code ordinance at its April 27 meeting.

Carving out ICE

The City Council also discussed an ordinance that would block civil immigration enforcement activities — like those carried out by ICE, Customs and Border Patrol and other federal law enforcement — from using or staging on city-owned property.

Shoreline is following in the footsteps of jurisdictions like Seattle, which took similar action earlier this year.

Staff estimates that 50 aluminum signs stating the ban would cost about $10,750. Though members of the city council were curious how the proposed ordinance would be enforced. The ordinance is categorized as a civil matter.

“There’s no criminal violation here. It’s not a gross misdemeanor or misdemeanor for ICE doing this,” said assistant city manager John Norris. “There’s limitations about what our police department can do, from an enforcement perspective.”

“Obviously going to court doesn’t happen within a half hour, right/ So I think we’re pretty eyes-wide-open that if four SUVs go into a parking lot, we’re probably not going to get injunctive relief to stop that behavior,” Norris said. The ordinance would give the city standing to take complaints to a judge and get an injunction…but only if the city, or the public, is aware of federal enforcement setting up.

The city council is expected to vote on the ordinance April 27.