Politics & Government
Shoreline Council to Discuss SPU Acquistion
Due diligence phase in acquisition continues
The Shoreline City Council will meet at 7 p.m. Monday night with the bulk of the meeting dedicated to a study session of the Seattle Public Utilities acqusition.
The meeting will start with a proclamation of Puget Sound Starts Here Month before moving on to a discussion of Seattle Public Utilities Acquisition Due Diligence process.
Shoreline's City Council Goal No. 2 is to improve Shoreline’s utility, transportation, and environmental infrastructure, and includes an action step to acquire the Seattle Public Utility’s (SPU) water system in Shoreline.
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In November of 2011, the City of Seattle and the City of Shoreline announced a tentative agreement in principle to the sale of the water system assets at a price of $25 million in the year 2020.
In late 2011, the City began the next step in the process, which was to perform an engineering and financial analysis to test the viability of creating a City water utility. This “due diligence” process has been aided by a citizen steering committee, created by the City Manager to review the analysis and process. The City Manager tasked the committee to make a recommendation to her, for which she will then evaluate and make a recommendation to City Council as to how to proceed or not.
Find out what's happening in Shoreline-Lake Forest Parkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
The Council was briefed on the progress of the citizen steering committee on March 5th. Tonight’s briefing is to review their progress since that date, review the due diligence information, review the continued negotiations with SPU in developing a formal agreement, and finally, to review the next steps in the process.
There is no immediate impact to Shoreline residents.
However, if the acquisition is to proceed, the financial mechanism to purchase the system would be a revenue bond issued at the time of acquisition and paid for only by the utility rate payers within the SPU service area. Citizens who receive their water service from the Shoreline Water District (SWD) are not financially affected by this decision. Repayment of the revenue bond, or debt service, would be incorporated within a rate structure approved by City Council.
