Morning, welcome to the Snohomish County Council, Health and Community Services Committee. Today is Tuesday, January 27th.
It's 11 a.m. We're meeting the Jackson Boardroom and also remotely. Before we get into the agenda, I'll read a brief public comment script.
We'll be taking public comment beginning in person and then remotely. In Zoom, you'll click the hand icon to raise your hand.
If you're calling by phone, you'll press star 9 to raise your hand. When called to hand, press star 6 to unmute.
Each speaker will have three minutes to speak, and please start your comment with your name and your city of residence.
Now we'll do a roll call.
Committee Chair Mead.
Here.
Vice-Chair Loh.
Present.
Committee Member Nearing.
Here.
Committee Member Dunn.
Here.
Committee Member Peterson.
Chair, there are four members present.
Great.
Thank you.
So with that, we'll go ahead and get into public comment.
We'll open up public comment for anyone that would like to give comment in person.
Go ahead and step up to the podium.
Seeing none, I'll verify we have no hands raised online.
Oh, we do have public comment.
Welcome.
Sir, if you're this poor guy on a scooter,
trying to get past this, the propane tanks,
and oftentimes too, they actually parked their van on the right-of-way
and on the sidewalk.
And this is the Starbucks over here in Mill Creek,
and there's a veterinary clinic here.
And where they set up is actually on the grass
and on the sidewalk in between two trees. At this particular stand, I know there
are other ones in all the jurisdictions. My sister even sent me an article from
Tacoma where they've got this, you've probably seen it, or they have this big
hunk of meat. I don't know if it's frozen on the inside or worms crawling
around or what, but it's kind of disgusting. But anyway, there's a
picture that Tacoma News had of like four of these outside of a house next to gas cans,
which I assume are the generators. That's what those gas cans are for. And they cook these
out of a home. They have no health permits. I don't know if I'm on a time limit here,
but...
We've got your family. We don't. Yeah, we do have your time right there.
Okay. Is it two minutes?
Yeah, three minutes.
Three minutes. Okay. And anyway, I guess today I just want to express I'm not
anti-immigrant. I'm actually pro-legal immigration and my friend has a taco stand which is actually
visually in line with this illegal stand. When I say illegal, I mean no health department
certification at all, no hand washing. I mean, the list is too long to go down and I'm sure
they'll go over that today. But anyway, so it's fairness. It's a fairness issue and
And my friend Carlos can't be here today because he's opening his taco stand legally.
He has the health department all the permits, three departments sync, the whole works.
So anyway, I just wanted to say that I think it's really a fairness thing.
It's a hazard.
They used to put the tent poles right on the edge.
I know I'm over time.
But anyway, I just wanted to let everybody know that I think it's not fair that
this group of people are, you know, skirting all of the legal processes.
They're not paying federal tax, sales tax, any of the county fees, they're not
using the health department and anyway that that's just what I wanted to say
today and my friend is here, Carlos's wife and I think she has something to
say as well. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. Thanks for joining us.
You have additional comment in person?
Okay, no worries.
Welcome.
Hello, my name is Rosario.
I live in Monroe, Washington.
I'm here in regards to also support my husband and his business.
He does have a taco, a food stand over in Linwood, Washington.
And it has been complicated with the street vendors.
Since he is going to be in a year since April, since he's been open, and since the street vendors have been basically on the streets, it has been making it really difficult, really difficult.
And I do have a lot of friends and a few family members that do live in Everett and Landwood.
And that, you know, they like to go around and see how the street vendors are and stuff like that.
And that the stuff that they would do is kind of disgusting that they would like, you know, dump their grease, like on the side of the, I would say, like the traps down on the cements.
And of course there's no sanitary, nothing at all.
And of course we do things the right way and it should be the right way.
Of course, we go to the commissary and all that stuff and we try to make everything nice
and healthy so nobody gets sick and all.
And to be honest, like I said, it's just been, it's kind of like a competition in a way.
But to be honest, we're doing the things the right way and while the street vendors
are just making it just much more complicated on my husband's business.
So we're here to see in which ways that we can support and do all that and make
get much more easy for businesses around him.
Thank you.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
You have any other comments in person?
All right, I'll turn to see if we have anyone online.
No hands are raised.
All right, great.
So we will close public comment,
and we will jump into our discussion items.
So we have two discussion items today.
We have DEM joining us, but we're going to do that second.
So first we have our Unpermitted Roadside Stand Briefing.
This stemmed from councils getting a lot of emails from constituents talking about what we just heard in public comment
and some other comments around these illegal street vendors.
And some of the council members had conversations with our health department.
I know that I have in conversations with our law enforcement team as well.
And it seems to make sense to kind of get everybody here to be on the same page.
Each council can be asking kind of questions in unison and I'll be here in the same information
and make sure that the public is getting that information as well.
So I appreciate the Health Department for joining us today.
We have Tony Kalinas here who is going to, I think, start us off with a presentation
and then stand for questions.
All right.
Well, thank you and I'll turn it over to you.
Great.
Thank you.
Everything set up here?
Well, good morning.
Thank you again for inviting us here to present on this topic.
Again, I want to point out to the pictures, those are the two stands we're typically
talking of.
their umbrella cart stands and then they're also going to be the 10 by 10
canopies selling the meat on a spit as we go through the discussion today. I'm
unable to advance my slides.
I want
to take the opportunity to just do a
quick run through the food program in the county. Our primary mission is to
safeguard public health and provide consumers food that is safe and not
adulterated and honestly presented. We do 3,600 permits in the county for
routine food. Last year, we had over a thousand complaints. That is for sanitary
conditions as well as foodborne illness. Of those 1,300 were for food
illness. We do 1,200 temporary event permits, and so temporary permits are
you think of festivals, fairs. We had over 400 plan reviews. That's new
businesses opening plan revisions that we deal with. And we lead first with a
health education. That is our primary focus is before you go to
enforcement is trying to educate folks on the rules and the code.
Our regulatory authority, so the FDA oversees all retail food in the state and the country.
They allows states can choose their own food code or adopt the FDA retail food code.
State of Washington has adopted its own code, and so all of our authority comes from the
retail food code adopted of the State of Washington.
The Board of Health, the Snomers County Board of Health can adopt code and change
code that way to make it stricter.
right now our code is adoptions outside of the state code are primarily on fee
schedules but there is that's where our regulatory powers come from. Again what
are we talking about today these uncommitted roadside stands they are
they're they're primarily we have the umbrella carts selling chicken products
and and melons cut fruit and then we'll have these 10 by 10 stands that
set up doing it's taco taco's pastore on the spit I want to these are
not food trucks. There are permitted food trucks that are allowed and are permitted.
These stands as they currently operate are not permitted by us and is highly unlikely we would
ever be able to permit them. Just so everyone knows they're not permitted. We see them operating
and the reasons largely around they just they have no ability for water or wastewater
to acquire or dispose it and they also don't have the ability to separate food or keep
food at proper temperatures.
So that's the primary risk we're seeing out there is lack of sanitation.
There's no hand washing facilities, no employee bathroom access.
The food storage, in fact, in this picture here, you see the temperature.
That is, we're working with law enforcement and we're able to go through and take temperatures
of the meat when we shut one of these stands down.
And we've seen that this is how exactly the temperature, 53 degrees, where you
would grow bacteria.
And there's no separate areas to store the food.
And so the food is cross contaminated.
It all gets packed into a vehicle, sand containers, and I will tell anecdotally a story that as
we – I'll go further.
As we've shut these down, we'll go late into the night shutting them down.
We've shut them down early in the evening and moved on to other locations that seem
the same operation set up again later in the evening.
The food inside has never seen a refrigerator, so we – you know, it sat out for eight
hours in the back of the – that was in August, just for an example of the roadside
stands.
And it's been a massive growth.
Both the proliferation has been, we went from hardly having any of these to, we've closed
over 40 this 2025.
And besides, I want to also mention, besides the health risk, other agencies are running
into waste disposal issues.
Some cities in the county have had issues with these folks dropping their wastewater
down into the storm drains and having to bring factor trucks out to unclog the drains.
It's a big problem in King County as well.
Transportation, as was mentioned earlier, the sidewalks are blocked.
They're impeding travel on the sidewalk.
When these stands first started in the county, they would set up on private property.
And when we discover them, we would reach out to the private property owner and work on trespassing, and it worked.
But other than the right-of-way, as you know, it's difficult to trespass folks in the right-of-way.
So these operations are in the right-of-way right on the sidewalk, blocking the sidewalk.
I receive a lot of complaints about the stands being opened, but one of the reasons I wanted to mention it today is
One of the complaints I do receive is about the danger of the propane tanks.
I had a gentleman call last year to let me know that he actually hit one of the propane tanks,
the vehicle on the side of the road.
So that's why I showed that there.
So it is a transportation only impeding the traffic, but just a safety issue in general.
And then again, economic fairness.
The Unpermitted Roadsight stands to take away business from properly permitted establishments.
You know, who have business licenses, both city and state,
were required, a FAR department approval, and are following labor rules.
So what do we do?
So what we currently are doing is we see a stand in operation or we receive a complaint
for the stand from the public.
Our staff will go out and visit the stand issued a cease and desist letter.
This letter lets operators know they need a permit to continue operation.
We wait for them to shut down.
We also provide them information on how to obtain a permit.
We provide that information in both English and Spanish.
And to date, we've had none of these operators have turned in a permit to try and get an application to get a permit.
But what we've done as they've moved mostly to after-hours responses, we try and pair up our after-hours response with an event.
We're already working at TEMP event.
As the past couple of months, we've been teaming up with law enforcement teams and we go out in the evenings with law enforcement.
We try and get – when our complaints – we try and get to as soon as possible, but we need to coordinate with law enforcement to go out in the evenings and shut the stands down.
But as I said earlier, they tend to open right back up on the next day.
In May, to try and get information out, we activated a closure website to where we can post our closures.
So we've been – so the public could know that these – where these stands are, that they're not permitted.
And again, we've worked out, on those notices, we made the decision to only keep them up for 90 days so the list doesn't become stale.
So we are getting out there, so we'll reinspect a lot of the closures up there.
We've closed multiple times and we'll keep doing it.
But I didn't want the list to just be a stale list because the stands do move around from intersection.
They're not always at the same intersection.
They'll move around.
They'll move around to different spots in the same night.
We're working on partnerships with the county law enforcement and the city law enforcement,
and we're really putting a focus on the supply side, on public outreach, on notifying the
public about the hazards of eating at these stands, and how to identify a permitted establishment.
I want to share on the numbers too, it shows up there.
We track all of our complaints, and in 2022 we had 16 complaints for these roadside
stands and it grew all the way to last year we had 203 complaints and we did a
five foodborne illness complaints associated with these stands from last
year and in kind of a metric we use is we ten percent of foodborne illness is
reported so we can multiply every time you see that you report it by times of
five. Again we've had 40 closures of stands since May
And then staff time. We started tracking this separately from a regular complaint time in September when we started doing stand-alone time.
Staff was going out separate of other duties, and so we've had 62 hours of after-hours response since September to try and enforce on these stands.
These are some links I wanted to share today. The first link is our notification webpage.
It's where we track all the closures. You can go there and see it.
We also discuss what a permit looks like so folks know what a permit is and what to look for.
Operators are supposed to have their permit on hand.
The second link is information we put out just of the risk of eating unpermitted food trucks.
And the third link is a story our comms team worked with King Five On last fall.
And again the issue is to get information out that this is a problem and really to look for a permit.
What does a permit look like?
And the last article, this isn't just a Stomach County issue, this really is a
region-wide issue in the Western United States all over. Our neighbors in
Tacoma Pierce County have the same problem and they used a tax and police
enforcement team to get into a home that was a kitchen making the food down
there. And those are pictures there of what that kitchen looks like. It is
it is incredibly unsanitary. We want to share all that information. So why
Why are we having a hard time with enforcement on these?
So again, we can only enforce the retail food code.
Our inspectors are not law enforcement officers at all, and so we run into an issue of identification
of operators.
We can't request ID, and in a normal system for us, we would go into civil proceedings,
and so until we can identify who actually owns these stands, that's where we would
take civil proceedings to.
Our enforcement we have now is all based around somebody having a permit.
So once you have a permit, there's all sorts of enforcement things you can do,
but if you don't have a permit, there's not a lot of enforcement set up.
Again, civil proceedings, which would be our normal course here, take time and resources,
and when the stands are opening, up and closing, switching operators,
it's not a very effective tool.
And then even for us going out and doing these closures,
We're still continuing to do them so we can notify the public, but we really need an
actual enforcement staff after closure.
Like I said, well, we've closed these down, and we see them open the same night, and that's
working in conjunction with law enforcement.
They open up.
One of the cities that we worked with, they were working – they were trying to close
the establishment down five nights in a row, and it still just popped up every night
for five nights in a row.
And as of late, we're running the safety issues with staff.
These stands are not operating during the day.
they pushed in the later hours in the evening and it's not from the operators
we're running more into safety issues from the crowds when we shut them down
so that's why we really want to partner with law enforcement as we're out
doing this.
Ideas we have reached out to partners across the state across the
country we've met with out-of-state health departments to get ideas some
of the ideas we're looking at is license plate tracking all these the
stands have vehicles parked there but the umbrella carts don't the
carts just dropped off and they're left there all day just on that but the
canopies have vehicles. We've done some tracking early on a lot of time it goes
to rental agencies or it goes back to a house and we'll send the cease and desist
letters to them and get no response. It's an idea if we're able to partner more
with law enforcement that's an option.
That kitchen picture from Turlima
Pierce is really focusing on the centralized kitchens is putting a
focus on finding out where the centralized food is being
prepared, the homes or warehouses where the food is
prepared at, and really putting an enforcement focus on
those, getting in there, shutting those down.
Confiscating food and or the equipment is an idea.
Right now, we do the season assist letter.
There's not an economic penalty associated with that.
It's a season assist letter.
We wait until they close.
They turn around, open up a couple hours later.
At being able to take the food and or the equipment,
We'll put in an economic cost associated with continuing to operate.
And one thing we want to do is if we hopefully get a next level enforcement is we do want
to actively enforce this and put a focus on it when we do get that option to spend a
couple weeks and months to really get the message out there once we get that new tool.
And as I said earlier, we really have focused on increased collaboration with our law enforcement
partners.
I think the big message I want to share with everybody is in order to be effective
for this, it's going to be necessary to adopt some code changes and we're going to have
to work in partnership with other agencies.
Next steps, again, statewide issue, this has been a big issue for almost a year and a
half now at the state level.
The Department of Health has convened a work group with all the local health partners
along with the state to discuss next steps, share tactics and what works on how to
enforce unimpermitted roadside stands.
The work group has had three meetings already.
There are early stages of discussion with State Attorney General to develop just a legal
path for food served and improvement establishments to be discarded.
So that's in the early stages right now.
We have the same idea here locally.
We've heard of successes from other agencies around the country having local work groups.
We're proposing to convene a work group of the local cities and county partners
and other agencies to share ideas and tactics to find some enforcement ideas.
And then we want to double down our efforts to get more information out on the public campaign
about the risk of eating in unpermanent stands and how to identify whether an establishment
has a permit or not.
And then we are working towards a solution and we're just going to say we're going
to need assistance from other agencies to have some success.
I'd like to open up for any questions.
Thank you for the presentation.
Thank you for being here.
Is that me?
That's not me.
Okay.
It's fixed.
If you have questions from the Councilmember, we're done.
Thank you, Tony.
I appreciate the presentation.
I appreciate that there's more of a multi-pronged approach.
Trying to educate the public, I think, is really important so that they understand
the potential health risk and the fairness aspect.
I know that this is statewide.
I appreciate that we're also trying to correct some misinformation, so you sharing
hearing how much time was put in for overnight response is also really critical.
I would say we've outlined the concerns.
I'd say I can't speak for the Board of Health, but as a chair of the Board of Health, we've
had updates on this a few times.
I'd say we stand ready if there's some code changes that need to be done.
So I think it's on our agenda throughout the year.
But if there are some code changes, that's something that I know that we're happy to work on.
And I know that you've been working in partnership with law enforcement, including the city.
So not just our sheriffs, but also connecting directly with city, police, and law enforcement.
Do you have an idea of the dedicated resources that you've been able to track for some examples of success,
either in other counties or other states.
Do you have an idea of what it would take
for dedicated emphasis for something like this
to get control of this?
It's going to depend on what path we take.
For example, we're in the early stages of food destruction,
and it depends if we would have to store the food
for a chance of appeal, you'd have to refrigerate that.
So the county would have to find a way to store that food.
So it depends on how our rule of the state of Washington ends up looking like as far as cost.
If we can dispose of it on site or dispose of a mealy in a dumpster, that would lower the cost dramatically.
Other success stories have been around taking the actual and hauling off the equipment,
which would involve getting a truck hauling it off and storing it in suicide locations.
And then, yeah, there would be some costs associated.
It's all evening work, so evening response time for sure.
Just a quick follow-up on – so the state, we have to wait for the state to decide what
you can do with, for instance, the food storage or can localities decide.
We don't care – like if we can pass a code that says if you don't have your permit
readily available and you're not willing to cooperate and show us your idea or whatever
it is, like we can write this code that says then we give our health department
enforcement or maybe law enforcement, whatever, the ability to discard the food or do we have
to wait for the state to tell us?
I think as far as our authority comes to the state, there would be a question for the
PA's office on whether would it be going too stringent if we were to then allow it?
For instance, when we were doing Blake a couple of years ago, this has nothing to
do with the health department, obviously, but individual jurisdictions were able to
decide what penalties we wanted for what drugs that were used and the state wasn't
superseding us until the Blake decision.
So that's what I'm trying to figure out is we don't have
our own abilities to say we actually don't want this
here even if the state thinks it's OK, or if the state wants
to require certain steps to be taken, refrigerating the food,
et cetera.
If we just said no, and so it's kind of a huge problem.
It's completely unfair.
It's unsafe.
If you're not willing to show us your permit, we're
going to throw your food away.
It would be something we'd have to look into in the
But I think it would be doable, and the question would be, is it from the health department standpoint,
is would it be going against what the code is saying in a more strict way or not?
That's the question, I think.
Right, but I don't want to cut your line of questioning off if you were still doing questions.
I'm on a different line now.
Okay, I'll come back to all of this, I promise.
I was done with my questions.
All right, never mind.
I'm going to keep going.
Do you have questions?
Okay.
Okay. So we, as a county, you're saying we have to figure out if it's against our code
or not. I brought this up three months ago. It might have been more than that with the
health department because I sit on the board of health as well. And you're saying that
we've closed 40, we've had 40 closures since May of 2025. You gave us the numbers of closures
or complaints, 16 in 2022, I think you said, and then over 225. So you've kind of seen
this escalation. I know I'm not the only council member that's brought this issue up either.
So what I'm confused about is you're saying there could be code changes. We've still got
a lot of work to do and a lot of coordination on this, but it's been months. And it's probably
been, I think I'm being generous, it's probably been a year plus that we've had this issue
multiple years that we've had the issue. But a year or two since we've had council
members like getting involved and in complaints and all this, it feels very frustrating
As a community member, I live in Mill Creek, and I know the stand you're talking about,
but also there's a stand on Boff Lever Highway 164th, like in everybody's face, blocking
a very utilized sidewalk.
I even know for sure that I literally have made a complaint, and there are many, many
constituents that have made a complaint about that stand.
It's been over a year at least since we've been making these complaints.
What is taking so long for even a code change proposal to come to us?
So, Council Member Mead, if you may, I'm Kim Van Pelt.
I'm the Health Department Director.
I've been with the Health Department since late October.
I do believe that the Health Department recognizes that this is a significant concern for many constituents within the county,
and it is a significant concern for the Health Department.
I just want to be clear that when we talked about confiscation of food or confiscation of equipment, that we had received a prior P.A. advisory letter talking about our authorities, and our authority in this area was confusing, basically, from the P.A.'s response.
And so one of the things we looked at is in these discussions at the State Department of Health, they believe they are investigating themselves whether there isn't currently authority to take food.
And so it seems that the most expeditious path forward would be if once they get that clarification, if there's already the authority, there doesn't need to be any other change.
So we're right now trying to get clarity about that issue in particular.
That will help inform some of our future actions.
Is that authority that you're saying our PA gave?
And they're saying, ah, there's ambiguity about if we...
They say there's ambiguity.
Now, do you...
They say county code or the state law...
It's the state.
I believe it's the state code.
So if I was to pose a question to our PA and said, okay,
let's assume the state doesn't give us authority.
Can we change county code?
I believe we probably could ask again for the PA's clarification on that.
But again, our thinking is that since TOH is already investigating and seems poised to quickly be able to render some sort of
reading of the state law or the state code related to authority to take food, that that's the most expeditious path forward.
I hear you you sang the word quickly, but I don't I mean it feels frustrating that I've been working on this for months or a year
And yeah, yeah, and we're now it's like well
Let's wait to see what the state says and I don't trust that the state is going to do this. I think that's
So I feel like going to prongs with this asking the prosecutor's office
Let's assume the worst. Yeah state is there something we can do at the local
They just say no the state supersedes period whatever the state health authority says is what it is
But we haven't even asked a question yet.
And I hear what you're saying.
I think our next step is we are poised to very soon have that convening that Tony talked about of local partners and look at what our next steps are in terms of this issue.
We are not just waiting for the state to take action.
We are looking at a simultaneous track of trying to take action at the local level.
Okay, got it.
All right, that's what we're doing.
Yeah, thank you.
So question, and this would probably
require a change of state law, but I guess just a question
on potential enforcement mechanisms.
Have we considered treating this in a similar way
as we treat a traffic infraction, for example?
I'm just thinking, if I have somebody who's just
constantly speeding through school zones
and causing a danger for students and whatnot,
if we're politely saying please don't do that anymore,
but we have no way of making that individual feel
some pain in the form of having
to pay a fine or having a license removed or what not.
But the enforcement is what allows us to get a hold of that and prohibit that activity
from continuing. So is there a way to treat these in a similar fashion where we do have
the ability, whether it's through state law, to say we need your ID and we're going to
issue a civil infraction and you're going to have to pay a fine and maybe that fine increases
as time goes on. Is that something that's being considered?
That is something that's being considered and that's where it comes to the partnerships.
And since we're not law enforcement, it would have to come from the law enforcement side
to do misdemeanors. But that's why we're excited to get the convening of all
the local cities and county partners together because that is if we go to the misdemeanor
option that would be something we could do with law enforcement.
Can we adopt that as a county or do we need to wait for the state?
That I'm not sure of.
I'm not sure on the PA's process for that at all.
Thank you.
That's helpful.
And then just a separate question, but I went on a ride along with law enforcement
and we're taking a look at some of these in person.
And yeah, the pictures tell the whole story.
I mean, this is causing significant issues
for the community, both for health concerns
and we heard about the issues it's
causing for people who are trying to operate the right way.
It seemed to me from my conversations
that there was some sort of coordination behind all this,
like the stands were in some way coordinated.
Is that your understanding?
Anecdotically, yeah.
When we shut stands down, they're
on the phone to somebody else and they're moving location.
that getting moved around. We've heard stories from cities where they've done a good job of
closing with the city and they set right outside city limits knowing exactly where the city limit
line is waiting for the next enforcement. So yeah, I do believe they're coordinated.
Is there a thought to, again, this is multiple counties, it sounds like it's
going to show all over the place asking the state if they can convene some sort of a task
force if this is coordinated at a multi-county level? That's what we're hoping we get out of
both the state convening we have currently in place and getting out of the local convening
is just some direct, because I think there is some definite partnerships across enforcement
lines here for sure.
Got it.
Okay.
We are looking into that.
Thank you.
Other questions?
Councilor Dunn?
So inspectors do not have law enforcement authority to require or request identification.
That's correct.
What are some pros and cons of changing that law?
If inspectors were allowed to do that?
Well, one of the cons would be you would just change what our inspectors are doing with that education first function.
You know, the pro would be we would be able to enforce quicker.
We wouldn't have to search for other, you know, support from other agencies to do the enforcement for us.
And are you seeing safety risk for inspectors when they go out?
We are. We are.
That's when we started getting agitated crowds and so we started sending either in pairs
or with law enforcement.
So law enforcement's our priority to go out with first and if we don't, for me, a
self-compliance will go out in pairs.
I appreciate the effort to coordinate with law enforcement, but also recognize that
they're also strained by resources.
So a review of kind of understanding the impacts financially and resource-based would be like both the health department and our law enforcement partners. Thank you.
Other questions from council members? Anyone online?
Yeah, I have a question.
Yeah, thank you for the presentation. Today I've been asking for this for a long time, so thank you.
do. I do think we should confiscate the food. I do think we should confiscate the equipment.
This is clearly coordinated. But my question is, have we worked with the Department of
Revenue at all to maybe go to one of these taco stands, pay through their Venmo? We
know what their Venmo is. And then clearly I don't think they're paying any state,
local or federal taxes. So, is there any opportunity to partner with them?
Possibly. Again, when we convene at the state level, we're hoping to give that information.
Tomorrow level is local. We just haven't reached out to revenue agencies yet.
We've been working with local law enforcement primarily, but it is an option.
And thank you for that. Also, I think you closed down a stand last week,
and it's my understanding I think it was closed down at four o'clock or so.
you guys did a great job. But three hours later it's open in the same location. So I mean we talk
about these closures but they're closures for a few hours. Is that something that you guys have
experienced through this process? Yes, I would say of the 40 closures, most of them are duplicate
closures, same location. Yeah, our team went out last Thursday with the Stomach County Sheriff's
office and shut down eight stands and that was the first one and as the
inspectors are going home for the evening they saw that one open again
one o'clock in the morning so yeah we do see that frequently. And then I want to
close with this I mean this was first brought to my attention about a year
ago or so from one of my minority business owners who runs a restaurant
who pays the fee to the health district to operate pays rent I think
seven eight ten thousand dollars a month in rent and having these set up within half a block of
their location. I'm very familiar with Carlos and his location I've eaten there before. I know the
struggles that Carlos has had in opening his stand where it's taken like six months of no
income to him and his family in order for them to be licensed properly and have the proper stuff
And it just kills me to have a business, a minority business owner who's come to this
country to open a business legally, to have other businesses set up within a half a block
who are basically making it so he's probably not going to be able to provide for his family.
So I really hope we can work together to really get to the bottom of this and like
I said, I'm all for confiscating the food.
I'm all for confiscating the equipment because this is too big of a health crisis in our
county, and we cannot afford to have people getting sick and going to our emergency rooms
because we haven't taken proper steps as a county to shut this down.
So that's all my comments.
Thank you for the presentation today.
Thank you.
Other questions from Councilmember, Councilmember Dunn?
So can you request that that state workgroup includes commerce?
well I'll bring it up at our next meeting for sure great great idea and then is
the concern risk so if we were to confiscate food or equipment the county
would be liable for lost profits or the concern is just I'm sorry it's take a
property you know with when we have the permit it's outlined that we can take
property and actually to close down and cease operation but when without a
How do we take the property from somebody on the street?
Because it's essentially a government seizure of property when we do that.
So what's the justification for it?
And the state's looking through health channels if they can find it
and working with the state attorney general to see if that exists in the current code,
that we can use it, or there's something they do at a state level
that we can use to then justify confiscating the food without a permit.
Can we also look at whether or not businesses where property owners can file as a trespass
area so that if you have on record that you're a no trespassing area, then if a food stand
opens up there, then that gives more tools for law enforcement to trespass a business
operating there or one of these food cards operating there?
haven't looked in that, something to look into for sure.
Other questions from council members?
Okay, so I have a couple more questions.
So you have done the 40 closures
and presumably these closures
have incorporated law enforcement?
Most of them, okay.
Most of them.
So I get that you have limitations
if you don't have law enforcement with you
and you can't take stuff, you can't even ask for ID.
Yeah, you get it.
But with law enforcement, you can.
So the law enforcement isn't asking for ID.
Law enforcement is showing up to a unpermitted
or you're not even sure if it's permitted yet,
Health Department said, hey, do you have a permit?
They say F-off, you don't know what to do,
you ask law enforcement, law enforcement says,
hey, do you have a permit? They say F-off,
and then law enforcement walks away.
They have an issue, the same thing.
They don't know what justification they have.
They have to have a cause.
Aren't these guys in right-of-way blocking public right-of-way?
That's illegal. You can't sleep in the right-of-way.
You can have a tent in the right-of-way.
I can't speak for law enforcement,
but they are not asking for ID either.
Okay. How do you know if a food truck has a permit or not?
You just go to the food truck operator and you say,
do you have a permit?
That's correct. They'll have a permit.
They're supposed to have it.
And they say no. And then what do you do?
For us, we look back in our records and know that if a permit
and they don't, they would issue that cease and desist letter.
That's how we would do it.
And then you have a cop next to you with a badge
and then that cop can do nothing different
than what you can already do as a health...
Again, except for the law enforcement agencies,
what they're doing right now, they're not asking for...
Okay, but then but why do you even have law enforcement with you or our staff safety just for the safety of the public getting mad?
Because we have been we worked with a couple of cities in the and the county sheriff's office really to go out and get some information about
What what the limitations are on enforcement? Yes, right right now. They're they're not and
Everett's working really hard and getting their their ordinance has changed and something there for sure, okay?
That's that's really frustrating and and annoying. It doesn't make much sense to me either
I get that you're not the Sheriff's Department and we should have the Sheriff's Department here as well
I'm going to ask the Sheriff's Department these questions and figure out why they wouldn't be asking those questions. It seems
Incredibly reasonable to me that they're doing something legal already just by being in the right of way. You cannot do that
But secondarily they're also operating illegally
Without a permit giving unhealthy food. Okay, so why okay?
So I'm gonna ask law enforcement that piece because I don't understand it at all if law enforcement says
Now, yeah, we could actually ask for ID.
That seems to solve this problem.
Then you can instead of using whatever dollars you're going to allocate to public awareness,
which I don't think will work.
I think that would be useless to tell the public, hey, don't eat unhealthy street food.
They're doing it.
They're going to do that.
So don't waste money doing that.
Have another permit person go out with another law enforcement officer and do more
than 40 closures.
Ask for IDs when you realize they don't have IDs.
What do you do there?
What are they?
You're able to you can't find someone without a permit you said so we're only punishing like the law-abiding businesses
So I get that so then we're not going to punish the ones that are breaking the law
But then we're also we're not gonna we're not gonna find them because they don't have ID and you don't get to ask
Them for ID so you can't even give them a fine
You can't arrest anyone. You're not gonna take any of their stuff
Why wouldn't they just why why would they have a permit?
Why would I ever go to the health department and get a permit ever?
And this is why it's proliferating because we've said, hey, please don't do it, but we're not going to do anything if you do do it.
And now it's like goes from 16 complaints to 200 complaints over three years.
So I'll ask law enforcement that piece and I get that you can't fix that.
We will do this again within a month and we will have law enforcement decide to you and we can decide this.
My last line of questioning is just the timeline.
So you said you were going to do the state and you're going to work with local partners trying to figure out what to expect
and get a little bit more aggressive about when we can expect something. I know
we can't figure out the state they got to deal with but our coordination and I
have homework to do that I'm committed to doing figuring out the PA ruling is
it a I don't if we don't have to wait for the state I will propose the code
tomorrow to give you authority but if we do okay we'll wait but what about our
coordination that we're doing do you have a timeline on that is it like
this month is it our summer is it coordination we're looking to send the
invite out.
That's okay.
Hello, Councilmember Mead.
Again, Kim Van Pelt, Director for the Health Department.
We have drafted the invitation and I have the invitation list
for the local convening.
We're expecting to have two, two-hour meetings in the month
of February.
And our, do we have some, like, local permitted businesses
invited to?
Or is this trust?
On the invite list includes some association members
For example, hospitality association, economic alliance, et cetera.
Food truck association specifically.
Food truck association is specifically on there also.
Okay, great.
Yeah.
Okay.
And then you said you're sending that out, and then when is the date that you guys
– is it multiple meetings?
It's two two-hour meetings in the month of February.
So one is middle of February.
I think we – I can't remember the exact date, but two in the month of February.
What we're going to be doing at those meetings is review our existing authority, what's been done by not only the health department, but by localities across Nahomish County, what's happening at the state level, what's happening nationally in terms of best practices.
And then we're going to have a discussion about how – what are the next steps in terms of either enhanced enforcement needed or collaborations needed to be able to address the issue.
And that second conversation will happen in the second meeting.
Correct.
Okay, so if your two meetings are done in February, say the next Health Committee meeting in March, we could do this again.
I have you here, but also have the sheriff, maybe the PA.
I think that would be great timing.
Okay.
Yeah, and we'll I'll plan on scheduling that that terrific. Thank you. Do you have any final burning questions from council members or move on to our next discussion?
Okay, I see none. Thank you both for being here. Thanks for answering all the threads. Thanks for the presentation. We'll see you next month. Thank you. Thank you
All right, our next presentation is
From DEM and we have I think Lucia's here Lucia's here. Hello. Welcome. And you also have a presentation
Yes, I can get the presentation queued up now.
Can you make me a – there we go.
While that is coming up, my name is Lucia Schmidt. I am the director of the Snomish County Department of Emergency Management.
Thanks for having me here this morning. I just wanted to, I think it should be a little slow to catch up.
I wanted to come and just share with you some stories from the historic flooding we experienced last month.
So I'd like to just give an overview of the flooding event, of the coordinated response
across the county, some of the remaining challenges, and the next steps because we are still in
it both in terms of the government side but also more importantly in terms of the
impacted population.
So when I say historic flooding, this map shows the extent of what was underwater at
some point during the event.
So it does include, well, so that's a total of 36,000 acres of the county were underwater.
That's 56 square miles.
And as you can see from the map, there it is,
you know, that does include the river
beds themselves.
So it's maybe a slight overestimate.
We weren't able to subtract that out from the total, but it's still an impressive amount.
And then also on this map, you can see the areas that, so the levees, the coordinated
for the structures along the Snohomish River.
And what we saw during this event
was that process worked as designed.
So up on the slide now, you can see the river gauge,
the measurements from the Snohomish River gauge
at Snohomish, and you can really see
how it just flattens out and stays there.
And that is because the levees
were overtopping as designed at that point.
And so that is why, you know,
marshlands, French slew there, received so much water.
But the good news of that is it did divert that water away from more residential areas.
So the other thing that I think is impressive about this gauge is looking at it.
You can see that the Snohomish River spent over 11 days in the action phase.
So this event was not only historic in the, you know, the height of the flood,
But it also was just a very prolonged event.
You might have seen during the event that the Atmospheric River we received was 7,000
miles long.
So essentially stretched from Washington State to the Philippines.
And then all of that passed through over dumping the water.
And then we also had the high atmospheric tides, the king tides at the time.
And those just kind of served as a wall and made it harder for the water to drain
out because the sea level was higher at points during the event.
So just a tremendous amount of water in our systems leading to flooding in all of our
major river basins.
It led to four evacuation orders were put into effect.
So when my slides catch up, you will see that that was E.B. Island, the Tuolco Valley,
parts of downtown Sultan and then the three River Mobile Home Park at one
point or another during the response were under evacuation orders. That's a
total of 790 residents were under evacuation orders.
In order to meet the
immediate life safety needs we had Swiftwater Rescue teams up and down the
river valleys working around the clock. So as of December 13th, so just in
the first four days of the response, there were 68 people pulled from the water and 19
pets were rescued from water rescues.
One rescue alone was a family of 11 people who were pulled from their house.
And then we did, in Snomish County, receive the one fatality that happened in the state
during that flooding event.
And that was a person who drove on a closed road that was flooded.
And just floodwaters everywhere.
You couldn't see where the road turned.
And so the driver ended up in a ditch where the water was quite deep.
We activated the County Emergency Operations Center from December 9th until the 24th.
And so we had about 20 agencies in the EOC representing county departments as well as some of our partner organizations.
We had Fire and the Weather Service there, and as well as some of the local cities participated at the EOC as well.
In that time, a lot of the focus was on pushing information out to the public, and so there
were over 2.4 million views of DEM's Facebook page in that time, and 175,000 views to the
public safety hub.
So there was a lot of interest in the community of what government had to say, what the
government was doing for this response.
Here I want to show you, this is one of the areas that was under evacuation zone.
So we have the Google satellite imagery here, so you can see what it normally looks like.
And I'd just like to play a video, hopefully, I
don't know if it's going to work.
I can share this video with you offline if you would like.
But you can see here the tremendous impact on the valley.
Oh, now it is starting.
Yeah, well, I ended up having to do my hotspot because I wasn't getting internet
at all, but that I think is impacting us now.
I don't know if it's going to be worth doing the videos.
So this is one area.
You can see that there's, you know, 50 mobile homes here, and this was one of the first
places we evacuated and then have
been working with the residents throughout recovery.
I'm going to give up on the videos.
So in response to places like the Three Rivers Mobile Home Park, we did work with the Red
Cross to stand up a shelter at the county fairgrounds and approximately 70 individuals
stayed there at one point.
We also stood up the livestock sheltering at the fair park and received over 500 animals
at the fair park at its highest census.
So 171 horses, over 100 cows, 96 goats, 16 pigs, 140 chickens, three rabbits and two
turkeys.
And I think one of the more impressive statistics is that we actually sent home more animals
than we received, because there was at least one birth at the fairgrounds during the event.
I don't know why I'm no longer sharing,
got booted off of Zoom.
The next area that I
want to talk about is the impressive work that was done by
the public works crews.
So there were 52 emergency road closures, hundreds of unique locations requiring response
from debris removal to shoulder repairs or washouts.
They inspected more than 30 scour critical bridges and activated the solid waste voucher
program which you all extended through March which has been a tremendous help because
there are places that were still underwater when it initially expired.
This photo here is from an effort that they did along the Mountain Loop Highway due to
some washouts, some active landslides there.
We couldn't open the primary road out, so they had to go out and open portions of the
Mountain Loop Highway so that families that were stuck behind the washout could make
it out or stay put for the winter, essentially.
These are, you know, per public works, the locations that still require repairs.
The total estimated damage is 3.6.
I recommend talking to public works directly.
Only some of that is federal highway eligible.
Some of it would be FEMA reimbursement.
I don't know the fine details of that.
but about $2.4 million of those damages are what we're submitting in the FEMA declaration
request.
So for the FEMA declaration, you know, that is split into two declarations.
There's the individual assistance package, which we've already sent up.
And that's the assistance that would go directly to the individuals who are impacted based
off of the data collected from us, from Wattcombe, from Skagit, from King, and Lewis, and Pierce
counties. The state says it is the strongest IA package they have sent to FEMA that any of
them can remember. So we are hopeful we will receive good news from FEMA, but it is entirely
presidential progative. So there is no way to accurately estimate. On the public damage side,
traditionally that has been a little bit more cut and dry. And there is the statewide threshold,
which was just published in October, is $14.9 million worth of damage for the state.
We don't – the state is still gathering information. They are out in the community now,
joint with FEMA, kind of investigating some of the sites of bigger impact. But just anecdotally,
I think it's easy that the state will be over $120 million worth of damage. So that is bigger
than $14.9 million. It's also bigger than the anecdotal four times the declaration threshold,
which is what the administration has signaled. And it's higher than the $81 million, which
is a formula based off of total taxable resources, which is something that they've signaled they
ultimately want to go to.
So by all numbers, we have a very strong case for public declaration.
The concern here is that a lot of those impacts are in public utilities, are in road repair,
And the current administration has signaled that they feel the federal government is more appropriate in the initial response phase and less so in the long-term recovery phase.
So as you can see in that second chart here, it's really the first two rows in that second chart of debris management and protective measures,
which is where the current federal administration likes to believe the federal rule should be and not in those more expensive buckets.
Here is another, we'll just call it an aerial view because we're not going to try on the video of the Snomish Basin.
So you can see this road here is Highway 9. Oops, it accidentally thinks I tried to start it.
And so this is the framing shot and then I'll wait for the slides to catch up.
There we go.
So, you can see that the area around Highway 9 along the Snomish River is completely under
water.
This image does not capture what's going on south of the river, but I can send those
videos separately.
Oh, it thinks it's going to try and play it.
Pause.
Hopefully it doesn't kick me out again.
So community recovery.
Some of the work that we've been doing in the community to try to help them recover, we
while we were still in the thick of the response, we held a couple of events out in the community
to help them report their damage to us and get some initial supports to community members,
as well as just guidance on what to do if you've lost documents in the flooding,
How, you know, help.
On submitting insurance claims and following up insurance.
Just want to note that we are at time for committee, but I don't know if you just have a couple
of minutes left if you want to wrap up. I know we have the slides accessible too.
Yes, I have a couple of slides left. I can go quick. So the impact survey that we completed,
we had 184 people submitted surveys, household submitted surveys with over $5 million dollars
worth and structural losses.
We held three disaster assistance centers at the Sky Valley VOA where we assisted 65 households.
We had representatives from state government there, representatives from county government,
as well as representatives from a number of nonprofits that were able to provide immediate
assistance to our impacted residents.
Some
of the outstanding remaining impacts, so looking at the economic impact on our agricultural
community in particular, they really got a brunt of the impacts, just nature of where
farms are located.
So there was tremendous loss of hay, of feed, of fences, farm equipment, greenhouses,
nurses, nurseries lost a lot of their plants in their bulbs, hearing anecdotally from some
farmers like if you look at the blueberry crop, you know, even the plants that survive
and they won't all survive, they're looking at like 40% bud loss.
So that's 40% lower crop this coming year, even if the plants survive.
And there are some crops like strawberries that we just don't know if they're going
to survive until we get farther out.
Greenhouses and hoop houses are another tremendous loss.
And a lot of these – so there was a USDA declaration.
A lot of these costs aren't eligible, and the USDA assistance comes in slowly.
So our agricultural community is going to be hurting this coming season.
Similarly, the impact in our tourism areas, up and down Highway 2, around the Mountain
Loop Highway, so for Highway 2, that period when kids are out on winter break around Christmas,
that is their busiest time of year.
And so they lost that entire season this year.
And then what we see here, I think this is Forest Road, I want to say 22.
You can see the guy in the yellow hat standing in the ditch there for scale.
But that is not a county road.
That is not a road that the county has any part in maintaining, but that is a road
that connects the county to the forest and then all of those backpackers, all of those
hikers that will come in in the summer.
And so it is we are working closely with the Forest Service to ensure that they can do the repairs they can.
And then, yeah, again, if you talk to public work, she can talk about the coordination on the portions of the forest roads that we do maintain as a county.
And then my next last slide is simply talking about the remaining needs.
And the big things that we are hearing from the community in terms of, oh, good grief.
Okay.
Is assistance transporting the debris?
So we have the solid waste vouchers, but those require you to transport it either to a dropbox or to the transfer station directly.
So we're working now with some nonprofits to see if it is possible for us to assist with the transport,
have trucks go around with volunteers who can upload stuff because not everyone has access to a truck.
There were a lot of folks living in RVs in the floodplains that were severely impacted.
And so there's a lot of RVs that are going to be suffering from mold that will not be
healthy homes for people to continue in habit.
So finding ways to connect people with resources to replace those RVs or travel trailers that
are their primary residences.
The uncertainty of federal reimbursement, it had some impacts during the response.
There was a lot of back and forth.
We had to – any resource that we were getting from the state had to be for immediate life
safety rather than instant stabilization, which created some delays that we'll look
at in the after-action review.
Things like getting light, our flights.
There was lots of landslides happening around Darrington, and, you know, we wanted to get
flights up there to confirm that none of those landslides were impacting populations.
And that was just an ongoing conversation of, is this life safety or is this incident
stabilization just based off of where we were concerned the land was sliding?
Things like that, I think if we had more confidence that federal reimbursement would
would have come in, then those conversations would have gone more smoothly, it would have
been less.
We would have been able to make those calls without feeling immediate impacts
on budgets, because both the counties budget and the states budget are, as you know, constrained
at the moment. Recovery, roads and trails are the biggest area that is going to require
ongoing investment. This here is the White Horse Trail. This washout is one of the
places where the White Horse Trail does serve as a flood control structure, and I believe
it washed out in a number of places.
So the section is closed right now.
It will require some significant engineering to repair that, and so if we don't get the
federal reimbursement, it will likely just stay closed.
And then, like I said, we are conducting an after-action review like we do every time
there's an incident to find out what we can do better in the future and to look
at what we did well, and build on it.
That's all I've got.
All right.
Well, thank you for the presentation.
Sorry for rushing.
You're trying to squeeze two presentations in one day,
and I will not do that again.
Do we have any burning questions from council members?
Council member Dunn?
I just want to give a quick shout out
to the
animal boarding at the fairgrounds
and appreciated all the updates to council
during the
patients.
And so just really appreciated all the current updates.
So thanks.
Council member Neary?
Yeah, just piggybacking on that.
Thank you to...
I agree.
It was heartening to hear all the community members who stepped up and were willing to
lead donation efforts and do what they could to help, so I appreciate all that.
There looks like there might be future volunteer or needs for volunteers for debris cleanup
and all that.
I am going to an event this weekend with some high school football team that's trying
to do some help clean up Instant Home-ish, and so I know that, and they've reached
out to me specifically to say, where can we send all this energy?
There's a lot of students that want to help.
So where would you recommend it? Is there a contact form on the DM website that volunteers can sign up or something?
Yeah. So right now most of the ongoing recovering needs is being coordinated through the Salvation Army.
They have a disaster case management contract through the state.
So I think the best bet for having conversations with their local community, finding out if there are people who need help clearing the debris off their lawns,
I think keeping it local is best for the kind of county-wide cleanup we're hoping to
partner with the Washington Conservation Corps there so we know that they've gone through
training on safety.
That's more like official and coordinated.
Yeah.
Got it.
All right.
Thank you.
Any final questions?
Anyone online?
Okay.
Seeing none, thank you.
Thank you for the presentation.
All right.
And with that council we'll be adjourned for the day.
Okay.