LYNNWOOD — For the upcoming Lynnwood City Council business meeting on Monday, Sept. 28, at 6 p.m. the city will host its first public hearing on a strained 2027–28 budget and then the council will take three standalone policy votes: a Public Facilities District board appointment, a freeze of scheduled 2027 utility rate increases, and a new local crime of exposing children or dependent adults to controlled substances.
Public hearing: a $21.4 million hole, and possibly larger
This is the first of two required public hearings on the 2027–28 preliminary budget. A second hearing is scheduled for Nov. 9, with adoption targeted for Nov. 23. The mayor’s full budget message and department-level numbers are due on Oct. 12.
The numbers already in front of the council are grim. Mayor George Hurst’s mid-September forecast showed a $21.4 million General Fund deficit for the two-year cycle—far larger than the $3 million shortfall written into the adopted 2025–26 budget. A Lynnwood Times analysis of the same materials put proposed revenues at $135.8 million against $157.1 million in expenditures and other uses, and warned that risks not yet baked into the forecast, including higher employee insurance premiums and jail-contractor uncertainty, could push the gap toward $29.6 million, or about 22 percent above projected revenue.
Staff describe the gap as a “realignment” after years of forecasts that did not match collections. Sales-tax receipts are projected down $6.1 million from the prior biennium; photo-enforcement fines and forfeitures are projected down $8.8 million. Hurst has said the paper deficit assumes the city takes its remaining banked property-tax capacity—an increase of about $7.1 million, or 47 percent on a cash basis, from $15.1 million to $22.2 million. Even with that levy, utility-tax revenue, and interest income, operating revenue still falls.
Options on the table include for the council to consider are the banked levy, keeping the 0.1 percent public-safety sales tax dedicated to existing police costs, another 0.1 percent sales-tax increment, further cuts, or a voter levy lid lift.
The hearing is the public’s first formal chance to speak to these assumptions before department presentations begin in mid-October. Background on how the gap widened after a mid-year financial review is in the city’s July budget update and the Times’ coverage of the Sept. 8 budget summit.
Utility rates: skip 2027, delay the rest
Public Works Director Jared Bond will ask the council to adopt an ordinance freezing 2027 water, sewer, and surface-water rates at 2026 levels and resetting 2028 rates to what had been scheduled for 2027. The change would leave the three enterprise funds collecting the same revenue as in 2026. Staff say the utilities can absorb the pause without solvency problems and that there is no General Fund impact.
The tables first adopted in 2022 Ordinance 3426 had locked in annual increases through 2028; current published tables remain on the Lynnwood Municipal Code. Sewer was the steepest track—about 12 percent a year after a multi-year catch-up—while water ran about 5 percent a year and surface water about 4.25 percent. Under the draft:
- 2027 rates equal 2026 rates (a cut of about 4.8 percent versus the old 2027 water schedule, 4.1 percent versus the old surface-water schedule, and 10.7 percent versus the old sewer schedule).
- 2028 rates equal the former 2027 rates, so customers never see the original 2028 step-up.
A typical single-family base bill (10 CCF water, 20 CCF sewer, 1 ERU surface water) would stay at $323.73 bimonthly in 2027 instead of rising to the previously scheduled $355.14, then move to $355.14 in 2028 instead of $389.97. Low-income discount rates would follow the same freeze-and-delay pattern.
The pause comes after the council’s Nov. 24, 2025, 4–3 vote to raise the city’s utility tax on water, sewer, surface water, and solid waste from 6 percent to 10 percent—a 66.67 percent increase in the tax rate projected to bring $1.9 million a year into the General Fund. Then-Councilmember Hurst, now mayor, voted no and warned that stacking the tax on rising base rates would drive large bill increases.
Supplemental Materials for the agenda item: Utility_Rate_Ordinance_2027_Rates.pdf
Exposing children to fentanyl and other drugs
Police Chief Cole Langdon and Deputy Chief Chuck Steichen will present a new municipal offense: endangerment with a controlled substance. The draft would make it a gross misdemeanor—up to 364 days in jail and a $5,000 fine—to knowingly or recklessly cause a child or dependent person to be exposed to, ingest, inhale, absorb, or have contact with a controlled substance, or with smoke from a substance the person knows or reasonably should know contains one.
Washington’s existing felony, RCW 9A.42.100, still covers only methamphetamine and certain manufacturing chemicals. Bills to add fentanyl, including SB 5071, have stalled in Olympia. Everett adopted a similar local ordinance in March; Snohomish County passed one unanimously in June. Lynnwood’s version excludes cannabis and valid prescription care, sits underneath rather than replacing the state meth felony, and sunsets if the Legislature later preempts the field.
The proposed ordinance points to a 2025 report from the Washington State Office of the Family and Children’s Ombuds. Among child fatalities investigated by the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, one in four involved an accidental ingestion or overdose of a controlled substance. Among near-fatalities, the share was two-thirds. Fentanyl was involved in 78 percent of those combined cases. More than half of the children were infants or 1-year-olds.
Those statewide findings match a string of Snohomish County cases that have already tested the limits of existing law:
- the April 2024 death of a 13-month-old in south Everett—blue pills on the floor, a burning-fentanyl odor, video of adults using drugs around children—after which five adults were booked only on misdemeanor reckless endangerment because responsibility was “diffused”;
- the 2022 manslaughter case of an 18-month-old who died of acute fentanyl intoxication after pills that looked like candy were found on her bed;
- hotel and apartment exposures of infants in Everett and a suspected fentanyl death of a 2-year-old in Lynnwood.
PFD board: Jacqueline Manlastas for Position 5
Tourism and Project Manager Ryan Bush will ask the council to appoint Jacqueline Manlastas to Position 5 on the Lynnwood Public Facilities District Board for a term ending Oct. 18, 2029. Council interviewed her Aug. 10 and later advanced her name at a work session.
The five-member board, appointed under LMC 2.31.010 and state PFD law, governs the Event Center and the 13-acre City Center campus now branded “The District.” That master plan—development agreement approved in October 2025—contemplates an expanded indoor-outdoor event center, locally curated retail, public plazas, a hotel, and about 400 units of workforce housing. Design and contractor procurement are underway in 2026.
Author: Lynnwood Times Staff
