By RUTH SCHUBERT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

There's little agreement on how to grow without destroying the town's character.

One major disagreement is over whether to annex the area designated for future urban growth, an area that would quadruple the size of the current city. One side sees annexation as inevitable, given the intent of the Growth Management Act. Others say annexation wouldn't serve the currently unincorporated areas better than the county does now.

"We're in a huge transition here, going from basically a bedroom, rural area to an urban area," says Mayor Jay Echols, a retired Seattle firefighter.

To absorb the coming population, Echols says the area needs an overall plan -- something the city can do best. He argues the city would be able to better coordinate services such as water, utilities and police to the urban growth area, services that are now provided by special service districts.

The city last year adopted an ambitious plan for re-creating Main Street, drafted with the assumption that Lake Stevens eventually would grow to include the entire area designated for urban growth. The plan centers downtown around a new town square and includes an expanded waterfront park -- complete with an amphitheater -- and new buildings for the civic center, library and post office.

Wayne Berry's waterfront home falls outside the city limits and he'd like to keep it that way. Berry, 51, says the city lacks the infrastructure to serve as the center of a 22,000-resident city. And it lies on the opposite side of the lake from the main retail core at Frontier Village, off Highway 9.

Berry, the owner of Apex Wood Products in Lake Stevens, doesn't trust that the city would put the additional tax revenue gained from annexation back into the infrastructure.

Attempts to annex land into Lake Stevens have been less than successful, including a modest proposal in 1993 that was rejected by 85 percent of voters.