Mayor Linda Redmon
SNOHOMISH —Mayor Linda Redmon’s proposed $115.5 million biennial budget includes major replacements of the city’s water and sewer lines, as well as traffic-calming and pedestrian infrastructure.
The 2025 general fund budget for day-to-day functions will be $14.8 million, which is $1 million more than 2024.
The total 2025 budget has $69.8 million in expenditures, up from $57 million in the adjusted 2024 budget. For 2026, it is $45.5 million in expenditures.
For 2025, allocated capital projects make up $26.4 million worth of the expenditures. These includes $18 million worth of street projects, $7 million worth of water projects and almost $13 million worth of sewer projects.
Within one fund, for 2025, the capital projects fund, one component, has $21 million worth of expenditures. For comparison, this year the city appears to be on track to spend $7 million worth of spending within its capital projects fund.
Projects were delayed, causing the budget bulge for expenditures in 2025. The spending plan is offset by a larger-than-usual amount of available money that went unspent.
The public’s next opportunity to comment in person is at the Nov. 19 City Council meeting that starts at 6 p.m. in the Snohomish Carnegie, 105 Cedar Ave. A public comment period the night of Oct 22 happened after press time. Council will skip the Tuesday, Nov. 5 meeting because it is Election Night.
The council will be asked to pass the budget at its Nov. 19 meeting.
Redmon describes the plan as “future-proofing” city facilities and infrastructure in her budget message.
“What you will see in this budget is an effort to start making the hard choices that have been put off in recent years; doing what’s right for our community now and in the future, not just what’s popular,” Redmon wrote in her budget message.
The 2025-2026 budget does not include a set amount of money for the future City Hall-Police Station-Public Works civic campus on Pine Avenue. Those funding decisions will be in the first half of next year when design and construction costs are clearer, and bond debt funding packages are finalized. The city has spent in the ballpark of $60,000 annually toward debt service during the past four years.
Looking ahead
In the next two years, park plans include drafting a master plan for the 10-acre Homestead Park off of Ludwig Road.
Snohomish itself might look at a brand refresh.
The Police Department is exploring adding Flock license plate reading cameras, Administrative Sgt. Chris Veentjer said.
The city will begin using an online public records portal which may make it faster and easier for people to obtain records.
It also may look to annex the North Lake Urban Growth Area into the city. This urban growth area is a residential area north of 22nd Street to just north of 56th Street SE.
One of Redmon’s longer-range goals indicated in the message is to add more electric vehicles for Snohomish’s fleet.
The biennial budget adds one employee to make the city’s headcount at 59 people, but the new employee would be a facilities job that would replace a $75,000 janitorial contract. Hiring someone would be cost-neutral, city human resources director Rebekah Park said.
The full draft budget can be read at www.snohomishwa.gov/budget
The city introduced a new high-performance budget dashboard that will let people dive into the budget and track the finances of projects openly and transparently. The technology is by ClearGov, a company from Colorado.
A downloadable PDF of the preliminary draft budget, and presentation slides from last week’s presentation, are also available at the same city budget webpage.
The Tribune found that ClearGov’s budget dashboard is inaccessible on older Web browsers on much older computers that cannot be upgraded further.
ClearGov itself says its web dashboard functions work best on the latest versions of browsers. A ClearGov company representative was not able to provide more precise details on the dashboard’s minimum browser requirements by deadline.
Split City Council votes no to property tax increase
The City Council fractured on taking a 1% property tax increase, and ultimately voted 4-3 to not increase property taxes.
Council President Tom Merrill and council members Judith Kuleta, Felix Neals and David Flynn voted to have no tax increase.
Merrill said he couldn’t support a tax increase right now because the general cost of living is increasing.
Others in the ‘no’ side were mindful that the council recently set prominent utility rate increases for water and sewer bills which start next year. The utility rate increases are what will partially fund the water and sewer infrastructure improvements.
The difference between a 1% property tax increase versus no property tax increase is that the 1% would have been worth about $13,500 in additional revenue for the city for 2025, and would have imposed an additional $3 increase on the average homeowner’s property tax bill in 2025.
Correction:
In the original print version of this story on the City of Snohomish’s 2025-2026 biennial budget, in a paragraph about capital expenditures, two figures were mischaracterized and the line did not explicitly clarify it was describing figures for next year versus the two-year budget.
For 2025, the city is budgeting to spend $21.6 million from the city’s capital projects fund, but the story mischaracterized the expenditures as “capital projects” as a whole. For 2025, the city is allocating $26.4 million for capital projects as a whole.
In the same paragraph, the story reports for 2024, the city will spend almost $7 million for “capital projects” as a whole. It will be spending $7 million from its capital projects fund for 2024.
The Tribune regrets the errors.
