The city of Bonney Lake recently notified households south of South Prairie Road of its intent to apply with the county for possible future annexation.

To anyone who has followed city business in the past four years, the plans haven’t come as a surprise, though some residents were concerned about what the notices meant to them.

“What does this all mean?” read a Jan. 12 email from Todd and Colleen Lammers to Senior Planner Jason Sullivan. “Is the city proposing to install a sewer system? Would we be required to hook up? What is the intent of the City? To include us inside the city limits?”

Sullivan reassured the couple the city hadn’t reached that stage yet. Plans to physically extend the city sewer system were at least 10 years away.

“The process for the county to consider the application is likely to take the rest of the year with a decision not expected until late in 2013,” Sullivan wrote.

In 2010, Bonney Lake filed a notice of intent with Pierce County to annex the unincorporated area from South Prairie Road to the northern boundary of Tehaleh into the city’s comprehensive urban growth area.

Pierce County Executive Pat McCarthy objected to the proposal, and the Boundary Review Board denied it in a 2011 decision, citing a lack of joint planning with the county and comprehensive plan preparation. The board also noted that a section of the proposed area, called Plateau 465, contained no urban development and was not subject to any development agreement between the county and city.

Pierce County designates two types of comprehensive urban growth areas: those that lay in unincorporated county space and those that are associated with a city government. At the time of the 2010 application, the South Prairie and Plateau 465 urban growth area had not been amended to be associated with the city.

Since the rejection, the city’s planning department has been working on a comprehensive plan amendment that would address public facilities issues, such as road maintenance, as well as a joint planning agreement with the county that would address Plateau 465’s zoning reclassification and impacts to the county’s mitigation agreement with the Tehaleh planned community.

The joint planning agreement would need to be approved by the County Council before a comprehensive plan amendment could move forward. A draft of the agreement is expected to go before the city’s Community Development Committee in May or June.

Should an amendment ultimately be approved, the city will be required to conduct a door-to-door census of all households in the annexation area, at an estimated cost of $25,000 to $37,500.

Sullivan reported at the April 2 city council workshop that residents’ top concerns about annexation were sewer costs: the cost of required hook-ups to the city sewer system, and whether the city planned to form a local improvement district to assess each landowner for construction of a sewer system.