Should Gig Harbor be in the PenMet Parks District? This person wants voters to decide
Bill Sehmel believes a lot of Gig Harbor residents don’t know they’re not part of the Peninsula Metropolitan Parks District.
Given the chance, he thinks they’d like to be.
“I’ve talked to people who live in Gig Harbor proper, and they use the parks system, and they’re surprised when I tell them they’re not in the park district,” he said. “… Let’s make them aware that they’re not, and let’s get them inside.”
Sehmel was one of the early PenMet commissioners. He served from 2004 to 2015.
Now, he’s leading an effort to collect signatures to let voters decide whether Gig Harbor should be annexed into the PenMet district.
“I have 100 percent confidence in the citizens that, given the chance, they’ll vote yes,” he said. “… As a former commissioner, I think that the PenMet Parks District is a very unique and very wonderful thing, and I think it should be shared by all the community, and this is the easiest way.”
He spoke to the City Council about his plan during public comment at a January meeting, and he said he’s talked to the mayor, the executive director of PenMet, and several PenMet commissioners about what he plans to do.
“The commissioners I talked to told me to keep going, keep it up and see what comes of it,” he said. “… I love my community and I want to improve it.”
Why Gig Harbor isn’t in the district now
Sehmel said the first time there was a vote to create a Peninsula Parks and Recreation district was in the early ‘80s.
“About ’82 if I remember correctly,” he said.
Voters rejected it, and he said many of those no votes were from Gig Harbor.
Then a couple years later, in ’84, it went to a vote again.
This time it had different boundaries, which excluded Gig Harbor.
It passed, and the Peninsula Parks and Recreation District was formed. It had bonding authority, but not taxing authority.
“It struggled along and did what it could,” he said.
Then the state Legislature changed the law in 2002 to allow municipal districts to form.
“Prior to that, you had to be an incorporated city to have a municipal park district, but after 2002 you didn’t,” he said. “Anyone could petition to have one.”
PenMet was formed in 2004, and today includes the unincorporated county west of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and east of the Purdy Bridge, according to the district’s website.
“It’s been 17 years since PenMet was started, and they’ve done great things out on the Gig Harbor Peninsula, and as the population of the city grew and grew and grew, PenMet Parks itself to some extent said that it was the park district of the entire community,” Sehmel said. “I think that there are people in Gig Harbor that don’t know that they’re not in the district, and at some point it’s going to become necessary for PenMet to charge out-of-district prices.”
By that he means the district will at some point start charging a higher rate for people who live outside its boundaries to use its programs and facilities, such as the future PenMet recreation center. He argues that’s not good for the community.
“Out-of-district fees, they’re hard to collect, and they’re just cumbersome,” he said. “It just dawned on me: ‘You know, the people of Gig Harbor haven’t had the chance to vote on whether they want to be in a park district or not since 1982.’”
Asked about the prospects of out-of-district fees, PenMet executive director Ally Bujacich told the Gateway she expects it’s something the district would consider.
“While PenMet Parks certainly benefits the entire community, we are first and foremost responsible for serving the citizens that reside within District boundaries,” she said via email. “We have seen demand for programs, which are currently available to residents and non-residents at the same price, continue to grow. In some cases we are not able to meet the demand, and there are wait lists for certain programs.”
The fees for the future $31.6 million rec center will be evaluated in the coming months, she said.
“With those circumstances, I do anticipate PenMet Parks will consider whether strategies like establishing resident and non-resident fee structures for programs and some facility uses, or creating priority registration status for PenMet Parks residents, would benefit the citizens of the District.”
How incorporation would work
Sehmel is in the early stages of his effort.
He needs signatures from 20 percent of the city’s registered voters. That means he needs about 1,800 or 1,900 signatures, he said.
He said he’s “shooting for as many pages of paper as I can fill up with qualified signatures.”
He plans to start collecting them when the weather “gets a little warmer,” he said.
The annual Easter egg hunt at Sehmel Homestead Park (named for his family) tends to draw thousands of people, and might be one place he tries to gather signatures, he said.
“I’d like to have it all wrapped up by this fall,” he said.
He’d take the signatures to the PenMet board, he said, and the commissioners would then be the ones to decide whether to put the issue before residents for a vote.
“If the board says no, I think they’d be cutting off their noses to spite their face, because it’d be awfully hard to go back and ask for funds,” he said. “… I really don’t see that as a possibility.”
What it would cost
PenMet is levying a tax of 67 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value this year, which amounts to $7.8 million for PenMet’s operations and maintenance, Pierce County Assessor-Treasurer Mike Lonergan said via email.
The tax rate for future years is likely to vary, he wrote, but: “If that same tax rate were levied on City of Gig Harbor property owners, where the total property value is $3.9 billion, it would raise an additional $2.6 million for PenMet Parks. This would be a two-thirds increase in property tax revenue for PenMet Parks.”
He said the average single-family home in Gig Harbor is valued at $655,000, which means the average homeowner would pay an additional $439.
“The rate for all property taxes in Gig Harbor this year is $8.89 per thousand,” he wrote. “If a park district tax of 67 cents were added, the new rate would be $9.56 per thousand (depending of course what happens with the rates of other taxing districts such as Peninsula Schools and the city itself).”
Sehmel lives on Fox Island, but said his property taxes would increase too if Gig Harbor joins the district, because he owns property in the city.
‘It’s worth seeing what all the possibilities are’
Gig Harbor parks manager Matthew Keough told the city’s Parks Commission at its meeting earlier this month that “… there is interest out in the community to see whether or not Gig Harbor the city should become part of a parks district or its own parks district.”
Keough explained at the meeting that “… some people have long advocated for maybe not having a competing park interest, or maybe having a shared budget, or an increased budget, because a parks district actually has higher taxing abilities, dedicated funds. So it’s a conversation that is going on, not with any action of the council and no proposal, but I do want you to know that there are discussions about it, including whether or not citizens will petition directly on their own for incorporation of Gig Harbor into the park district.”
He said the city and PenMet staff are cooperating and talking about what makes sense.
“We shared our project list together and were able to say that we want to cooperate and help each other with each other’s missions,” he told the Gig Harbor commissioners. “So no position was taken by the organizations, but the community, including an active citizen, is taking a position.”
It’s possible, he said at the meeting, “The City Council may decide that they’re very interested in that kind of park revenue and looking at having a park district of its own, because that is one of the possibilities that could go forward. It may be that we’re able to say: ‘Let it play itself out and see what the citizens want.’”
Louse Tieman, vice chair of the Gig Harbor Parks Commission, said at the meeting she was “all in favor of that, of those conversations, however they come out at the end of the day, it’s worth seeing what all the possibilities are.”
She said the greater Gig Harbor community doesn’t “really care about the fact that a PenMet parcel is PenMet and a city parcel is the city’s. They don’t know, they don’t care, and it feels like we are one community that we’re proud of and happy with, and it has needs, whether you live in PenMet’s district or you live in the city limits … .”
Sehmel argues annexation wouldn’t make a difference to the city’s park properties. The city would still determine how it wants to run its own parks.
“Gig Harbor has fine parks for what they’re meant to be used for,” he said.
But the community as a whole is short on space to play organized sports, he said, and parks are “very expensive to build and to maintain.”
Gig Harbor has grown significantly in the past decade, he said.
“With all the new people moving to Gig Harbor, a lot of young families, the kids from those families are going to need fields and programs. … I feel that it’s time to do it. No one else has tried it, so let’s do it now.”
This story was originally published February 20, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
