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Lake Stevens mayor highlights fiscal gains, Moody's upgrade and City Hall campus plan
Summary
Mayor delivered an annual "state of the city" presentation highlighting a Moody's AA1 upgrade tied to policy improvements, the city's balanced budgets and a plan to remodel purchased downtown buildings into a City Hall campus financed by bonds without new taxes.
Lake Stevens Mayor (unnamed) onstage for the city's annual state-of-the-city presentation summarized last year’s financial results and outlined plans to convert recently purchased downtown buildings into a municipal campus.
The mayor said the city’s financial health earned a Moody’s upgrade to AA1, noting the rating reflected “policies and procedures, updates, and upgrades” that came from the city’s American Public Works Association accreditation work. He described the upgrade as enabling the city to borrow at lower rates when it pursued bonds to buy property for the City Hall project.
The mayor emphasized the city maintains balanced annual budgets, a “good strong general fund reserve,” and clean financial audits. He said the city “went out for a bond measure for our city hall project,” and later that staff “were able to go out and bond the money to purchase those” downtown buildings; he added the financing was done “without raising any additional revenue to fund those bonds.” The mayor said one building will be remodeled for City Hall and another for council chambers and that the project could finish in spring 2026.
Why it matters: the Moody’s rating and the bond financing affect borrowing costs and the city’s ability to fund capital projects without asking voters for additional taxes. The City Hall campus is also intended to free up other buildings downtown and open new parking near North Cove, the mayor said.
Supporting details from the presentation: the mayor said the city’s revenue mix has shifted so sales tax now surpasses property tax, that annual financial audits are passed, and staff undertook a SharePoint migration and records-digitization effort to improve responsiveness on public records. He also said the municipal services division processed over 1,900 public records requests and logged more than 2,200 staff hours on records fulfillment.
The mayor concluded by thanking staff and council and by framing the year’s results as the product of staff work and community involvement.
