Today's dig

[wrog]

 
Lake Forest Park

Which is it?

A park associated with Lake Forest?
Or with the lake forest (i.e., "lake" disambiguating one of several forests)?
Or maybe there's a forested park that happens to have a lake named for it?
Or "park" disambiguates a particular forest and the lake is named for that?
Or "park" is disambiguating between several lake forests? or forest lakes?

Never mind that the actual entity in question is neither a lake, nor a forest, nor a park, but rather a city (*).

This has been driving me batshit.

(New rule: Maximum of one (1) noun in place names. Yes, I know, being able to use two nouns is occasionally useful, but you've now abused that privilege; too bad).

(*) which is to say "city" in that stupid Western sense where anything that has any sort of local government at all qualifies even if the only inhabitants are a dog and two cactuses, but don't get me started on that...

Comments

[wrog]

I guess my question is not so much why there's sprawl, but rather why Bothell and only Bothell was allowed to cross the county line, which seems like it would be a major hassle for the city/county governments involved -- otherwise it would be happening in a whole lot of other places (cf, Shoreline and Edmonds, Federal Way and Tacoma, Wenatchee and East Wenatchee, tri-cities) -- vs. either organizing a new city which wouldn't have been that big a deal given the amount of incorporateable land available in the late 80s or just telling everyone to join Mill Creek.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

I think that because Mill Creek like LFP was a planned community, they had no desire to expand. I don't think the state really coordinates this--it's up to the counties. I also get the impression that Snohomish County dragged its heels on the GMA at first. Bothell was closer and acted more quickly than any other real or potential municipality.

The cores of Edmonds and Shoreline are both much farther from the county line than Bothell's core (about two miles each instead of a mile). Federal Way's core is more like four miles from the county line, while parts of the port of Tacoma are only about a mile from the line. So in all those cases, it made much more sense for the border areas to stay incorporated with the larger population centers on the same side of the county line. (ETA: Wenatchee, East Wenatchee, and the Tri-Cities all evolved as separate municipalities before the GMA, unlike the SnoCo parts of Bothell which were unincorporated until the 1980s.) I really think Bothell's case is just an accident of geography.

One other thing--incorporated areas get most of their services from the incorporated city and not the county, so the split status is not really that confusing. Areas where the county still retains some influence in cities include things like water and sewer. But again accidents of geography make that not so much of a deal. The county line almost coincides with the division between the Lake Washington watershed and the Snohomish watershed, so figuring out jurisdiction is not as difficult as you might think. The new sewage plant with a pipeline that crosses counties has been contentious, but that's a case where the counties are the relevant government entities and the cross-county status of Bothell is irrelevant.

And clearly I've thought about these issues far too much.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

Also, in today's news, apparently the downtown Bothell project is still going forward full-steam despite the recession.