The Everett City Council managed to do what it usually does on a long Monday night: hand out a nice citation, move a stack of appointments around, pass a couple of routine items, and then wander into the city’s favorite modern hobby — arguing over a hypothetical data center no one has actually proposed.
The cleanest moment of the night was the recognition of WayBetterU Fitness Studio.
Councilors Stephanie Martins and Holly Garcia presented a citation to Sam Amato for the business’s fifth anniversary at 153B Main Street in Santana Plaza. Martins read through the studio’s work with youth programming, seniors, special-needs students, CPR training, blood pressure screenings, and city recreation efforts when public facilities were hard to access.
Amato kept it simple. “Thank you so much for the opportunity to be up here and be recognized by my community,” he said. He added, “It’s not just about fitness, it’s also about building community.” Fair enough. Unlike a lot of ceremonial items, this one was tied to actual work people can point to.
Then the council moved into code changes involving the administration, and that is where the useful questions started.
Councilor Al Pietrantonio asked the obvious thing: are these just title changes, or are jobs being added while everyone pretends it is just paperwork? He asked directly, “Did we eliminate any jobs with this?” and then again, “Are we cutting jobs?”
Council President Stephanie Smith answered that one change was “just a title change” from chief financial officer to “chief financial and administrative officer.” On the second change, she said, “We did not have a chief development officer, so we had to amend the code to put the chief development officer in.”
That is not the same thing.
Pietrantonio kept pushing, trying to pin down whether positions underneath these titles were being removed or consolidated. Smith said the financial post was a “repurposed position” and described it as combining “the chief of staff and CFO together.” Pietrantonio then asked again whether any departmental positions had been cut. The answer was hazy enough to stay hazy. At one point the response drifted into budget timing: “As of the fiscal year 26 budget, we have not. I am not aware of the fiscal year 27 budget yet.”
So what did the council actually approve? One retitled post, one newly added development post, and no especially crisp explanation of what the long-term staffing plan underneath those changes is supposed to be. If you are keeping score at home, that matters more than the polished title does.
The council then heard public comment on the Docklands data center ordinance, which continues to be treated as if Everett is fighting off an invading army rather than revising zoning language around a use no developer has filed for on that parcel.
One speaker cited the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and claimed a 5-to-20 megawatt data center could consume “roughly 110,000,000 gallons of water per year” for cooling, then warned, “I can only imagine what 100 megawatts would use.” Another speaker accused Davis Companies of acting in bad faith and said it was “disingenuous” to claim partnership with the city while objecting to restrictions.
Selena Hernandez of 201 Broadway said she supported the proposed ordinance because it “limits the size of data centers and sets up safeguards for Everett citizens.” She called the restrictions “reasonable,” said a 100-megawatt facility is a hyperscale center “according to IBM,” and warned about impacts to “our air, our water, our health, and our electrical infrastructure.”
That was the frame: a nationwide battle, corporate profit, public health, looming environmental harm.
What was still missing was the same thing that has been missing for months: an actual data center proposal from Davis at Docklands.
That gap matters. The whole fight has been built around zoning text and speculation, not a filed project. The public comments treated the threat as settled fact anyway. That may be effective politics. It is not the same thing as a record.
After public participation closed, the council suspended the rules to take up Item 32, the wage theft and labor standards ordinance, though the transcript section provided here cuts off before the full debate on that item. So for now, what can be said is procedural: the council pulled it out of order, signaling they wanted to get to it promptly.
On the less glamorous but more concrete side of city business, items 26 and 27 dealing with the nip issue moved with favorable action after a short and slightly messy exchange. One speaker argued that if the city is not going to ban nips, it should support a statewide bottle deposit, adding, “I’m tired again of seeing nips at the end of a kid’s slide.”
Smith, in no mood for free-form theorizing during what was supposed to be a question period, cut in: “These are not questions. These are things that if you wanna talk to the licensing commission, we actually have a licensing commission with a full board and a chair where you can bring your issues to.” That was one of the sharper procedural corrections of the night, and not an unfair one.
The items passed 10-0.
Garcia then asked whether any department heads had signed in. Clerk Rocky Cornelio answered, “No department heads signed in.” Which tells you something about how much of the evening was built around actual executive-branch engagement versus the council talking among itself.
The council also pulled mayoral appointments, items 12 through 17, out of order and referred them to Legislative Affairs. Routine enough.
The last notable item was Councilor Wayne Matewsky’s resolution asking Encore to provide its future Las Vegas-style entertainment plans — the sort of thing that was promised when the casino was selling itself.
Matewsky said, “As a state representative, I attended every hearing in favor of the casino. I expected a little bit more.” He acknowledged the pandemic disrupted things, but then made the point plainly enough: “When they first opened, they had Tony Bennett, and they had the KC and the Sunshine Band… But that was five years ago. Hello?”
That is a fair question. Everett gave up a lot for that site. If Encore sold the state and the city on being more than a slot machine with valet parking, then asking where the entertainment piece went is not exactly radical.
That may have been the most grounded political point of the night: less fantasy, more follow-through. A useful standard for the rest of the agenda, frankly.