The Snohomish City Council at a meeting in the upper level of the Carnegie Building in September 2022. The council meets at 6 p.m. on the first and third Tuesday of each month at the Carnegie Building, typically in the lower level.
Photo by Michael Whitney.
SNOHOMISH — The City Council will hold a second public hearing and vote to decide at its March 5 meeting on what to enact off a menu of affordable housing incentive proposals that include potential waivers of park impact fees, traffic mitigation fees or utility connection fees.
City Council members last week said they want to ensure some waivers do not rob from needed future park or road funding. Waiving utility fees would be covered by the city’s previously enacted one-tenth of 1 percent tax for affordable housing which has been accumulating $500,00 a year.
The developer incentives would be offered citywide.
Any developer that accepts these incentives must keep part of their units below a set price level and commit to do so for 50 years.
What’s “affordable” is defined by the cost of housing and utility costs being not more than 30% of a family’s annual income. What’s set for the benchmarks are by taking the average median income (AMI) of the people in an area (the median being 100% AMI) and then cutting down to set the benchmark, and seeing what 30% of that is to set the maximum price cap for what can be called “affordable housing.”
City planners propose benchmarking the income level based on the county’s AMI which is updated annually. The county’s latest 60% AMI is $60,919. The city’s own 60% AMI is lower at $49,038.60, but the city doesn’t want to use it because that is only updated every five years and has a larger margin of error.
