Editing Smokey Point, Washington (section)

===Annexation dispute===
In the early 1990s, after a controversial land-use was proposed for the area, several property owners began an effort to petition the City of Arlington to annex a large portion of the Smokey Point community. Around the same time, another group of property owners began an effort to annex much of the same territory into the City of Marysville. The group working on annexing into Arlington was able to reach the required 60% assessed value threshold first, enabling their annexation to move forward.

The City of Marysville, having a vested interest by being the sewer and water utility provider for the area and having an interest in annexing Smokey Point, challenged the annexation, along with the residential community whose property was added to the annexation boundaries by the state Boundary Review Board for Snohomish County.

At that time, there was a single Arlington-Smokey Point-Marysville Urban Growth Boundary, causing confusion as to what city could potentially annex which area of Smokey Point. After many meetings with [[Snohomish County]] officials, the two cities ended up with separate urban growth boundaries for future annexation. Arlington was given the northeast portion of Smokey Point; Marysville was given the western and southern portions. However, when this proposal was presented to the local community, there was overwhelming opposition, as the community desired to have their entire community be annexed into one city, not split between two. The County Council had the final say and approved the territory divisions.

To further complicate things, there was a little-known state law on the books that would have transitioned the annexed territory from the Lakewood School District that served Smokey Point to the school district of the annexing city. Being that nearly all of the commercial area of Smokey Point was petitioned to be annexed into Arlington, the loss of such a tax base would have been devastating to the Lakewood School District.{{citation needed|date=April 2020}} Local residents in Smokey Point and Lakewood also circulated petitions to incorporate the area as a separate city to preserve the school district's taxing base.<ref>{{cite news |date=April 28, 2008 |title=This week in history – from The Marysville Globe archives |url=https://www.marysvilleglobe.com/news/this-week-in-history-from-the-marysville-globe-archives-45/ |work=The Marysville Globe |access-date=April 12, 2020}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last=Denn |first=Rebekah |date=May 8, 1999 |title=Town offers piece of the past for every piece of the present |page=D1 |work=[[Seattle Post-Intelligencer]]}}</ref>

Because of these issues, local residents in the area formed a group called Save Our Community and Schools (SOCS). SOCS worked tirelessly with their local state representatives to change the law to protect the Lakewood School District. Those efforts were successful, and the Lakewood School District remains intact today.

After receiving much input from the local community with the desire to keep their community intact, SOCS filed a Notice of Intent for Incorporation, which would create the City of Smokey Point-Lakewood. The proposal was put on hold, however, since state law mandated that incorporations cannot occur while an annexation involving land in the same area is still pending.

After years of controversial court battles, lawsuits, redrawn boundaries, and strong opposition by the residential community, the annexation question was finally resolved in 1999, when the City of Arlington annexed the northeast portion of Smokey Point. The actual land annexed was but a small percentage of the originally-petitioned area, due to the redrawn urban growth boundaries. As a result of the annexation, the effort to keep the Smokey Point community intact ended, along with the hopes of incorporation. As expected, in the years since then, the southern and western portions of Smokey Point have been annexed into the City of Marysville.