Town offers piece of the past for every piece of the present

By REBEKAH DENN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The stockyard door swings open at the livestock auction in Smokey Point, the wide-eyed Herefords trot around the ring and the farmers tote up their worth with a single sharp look:

"Sixty-one, sixty-one, sixty-one," the auctioneer chants, eyeing the bottom bleacher row to see if the sturdy heifers will bring another dollar or two per hundredweight from the serious bidders.

The names of auction regulars are branded on wooden plaques above their seats, spittoons are handily scattered about, and the ringside doors slam open and shut for an ongoing parade of cows, sheep, hogs and goats -- just as they have been every Tuesday in Smokey Point for the past 38 years.

"There are better prices here than in Lynden," said rancher Ellen Courtney, who trucked 40 head of young cattle from Whatcom County down to the auction last month.

Beyond price, there's also tradition: The Courtney family has sold at Smokey Point since the cooperative auction began, and it shows. A few minutes after their heifers sell, the buyer walked over with a smile; with opinions on the bidding wars he'd lost and won that day; and with a jar of fresh amber honey for the Courtneys from his farm's beehives.

There's a piece of the past like the auction house for every new strip mall and jam-packed housing development in the Smokey Point area; with grain silos, corn fields and dandelion-studded meadows still checkerboarding the landscape along with a teeming mix of new businesses and new homes.

Large concentrations of both senior citizens and young families -- a blend of pioneer spirit and new blood -- are helping Smokey Point protect itself to some degree as it grows. Its tenacious residents have staved off jails, tank farms, strip joints and other unwelcome newcomers even as the community's white-hot location off Interstate 5 makes it a focus of new development and the center of a tug-of-war among its city neighbors.

"There are an awful lot of old-timers out here," says Neil Knutson, whose parents were early Smokey Point settlers. "It's the old-timers that have spread their values to the next generation. And the next generation stayed. We like what we've got here." It seems everyone in the region likes Smokey Point -- or at least wants a piece of it.

The city of Arlington, its northern neighbor, has been working for years to annex Smokey Point's northern half, giving the city direct freeway access and a richly burgeoning source of business taxes.

The city of Marysville, its southern neighbor, wants to annex the other half.

Freedom County organizers, the secessionist movement seeking to split off from Snohomish County, claim Smokey Point as their headquarters.

And a community group called Save Our Community and Schools has been working to incorporate the area as its own city of Smokey Point-Lakewood. The proposed city would include the Lakewood neighborhood west of the freeway, an older area that's considered a part of Smokey Point.

Pro-incorporation signs line the main drag of Smokey Point Boulevard like Burma-Shave ads. After a recent court decision that favored Arlington's annexation over incorporation, a new message on the community billboard swiftly warned, "It's not over yet."

The area has an unusually diverse mix of uses as well. Excluding the Lakewood area, which is mostly residential, county planners calculate that roughly half of Smokey Point is zoned for housing, with 824 acres of residential zoning, compared with 492 acres for industrial use and 248 for commercial use.

The hubbub over Smokey Point couldn't have been imagined in the days before I-5, when the neighborhood was little more than farms and country homes. Even Everett residents, just 15 miles away, considered Smokey Point hopelessly in the sticks.

Today, residents are waiting on tenterhooks to see where their future lies.

Most expect Arlington to proceed with its annexation in coming months, with a Marysville annexation in coming years. They wonder whether Smokey Point can retain its own identity if it's split between two established towns.

But a final decision would allow the community to move forward, said Mary Ann Monty, one of the earliest developers in Smokey Point, who favors the Arlington annexation.

The wait "drew everything to a standstill," says Monty, who is working to bring a large hotel and office complex into Smokey Point.

No matter which way the land use decisions go, resident Cordice Dinger hopes Smokey Point's strengths won't be lost in the process.

"Smokey Point needs to be appreciated for being Smokey Point, not a part of something else," she says.

"It needs to be appreciated for what it's done on its own."