What is the NR-MHC zone?

NR-MHC stands for Neighborhood Residential – Manufactured Home Community. It is a new zoning category restricting the underlying land of seven specific Everett mobile home parks against redevelopment into other uses without an explicit rezone.

When is the public hearing?

Wednesday, May 6, 2026, at 6:30 p.m. in council chambers at 3002 Wetmore Avenue.

Will my lot rent change because of this?

No. The NR-MHC zone does not regulate lot rents. Rent between you and the park owner remains governed by your lot lease and Washington state landlord-tenant law.

Can my park owner still sell the park?

Yes. The zone does not prohibit sale or transfer. It restricts what a buyer can do with the land afterward — specifically, redeveloping it into a non-manufactured-home-community use requires an explicit rezone.

Can a future council remove the zone?

Yes. A future City Council can amend or rescind the zone through the same legislative process. The protection is durable but lives inside the political process.

What if I cannot attend the May 6 hearing?

Submit written comment through the city’s standard public-comment channels in advance of the hearing. You can also contact your council member directly. Working with a neighborhood organization, housing advocate, or trusted neighbor to make sure your voice is in the record is a strong fallback.

How do I find out my parcel’s current zoning?

The City of Everett Planning Department is the authoritative source. Their public counter and online zoning map will show your parcel’s current designation and the proposed NR-MHC change. Contact Planning at (425) 257-8810 or visit everettwa.gov for current zoning information.

Does this affect the city’s broader budget or my taxes?

The NR-MHC ordinance is a zoning code amendment with no direct tax or budget line item. The broader anti-displacement strategy interacts with the city’s housing programs and Comprehensive Plan implementation, which sit inside the larger 2027 budget conversation covered in our complete budget guide.

Blog

Your GA4 Referral Traffic Report Is Ranked Wrong — The Quality Inversion That Changes Your Strategy

Open your GA4 referral traffic report and sort by sessions. The source at the top of the list is your most valuable referral partner, right?

Almost certainly not. The default GA4 referral view is sorted by volume. Volume is the wrong metric for understanding referral quality. And the gap between your highest-volume referral source and your highest-quality referral source is almost always larger than you expect.

The Quality Inversion

When you re-rank your referral sources by engagement rate instead of session count, the leaderboard flips completely. The source you have been grateful for because it sends 300 sessions a month is often delivering 6-8% engagement — users who arrive, glance at the page, and leave in under 10 seconds. The source sending 8 sessions a month may be delivering 70%+ engagement — users who read deeply, navigate to related pages, and return weeks later.

From a content investment perspective, those 8 sessions from the high-quality source are worth more than the 300 from the volume source. They represent real readers who found genuine value. The volume source is sending noise.

What Drives the Gap

The gap between volume and quality in referral traffic usually comes down to three things.

Intent alignment. A high-volume referral source often sends users whose intent does not match your content. A directory site might link to you as a resource while its users are looking for a service provider. They arrive, realize you are informational content, and leave. A niche newsletter that links to you as recommended reading sends users who explicitly opted in to this exact type of content. Every session is pre-qualified.

Audience specificity. The broader the audience of the referring site, the lower the average quality of the traffic it sends you. A general-interest news aggregator sends everyone. A specialized community sends people who care about your topic.

Editorial context. When a referring site links to you in the body of a relevant article with a reason to click, the user arrives with context and intent. When your URL appears in a list of 50 links on a resource page, the user arriving has no specific reason to engage with your content over anyone else on the list.

How to Find Your Hidden Gem Referrers

The query you are looking for in GA4 is not “which referral source sends the most sessions.” It is “which referral sources have fewer than 20 sessions but an engagement rate above 50%.”

That filter surfaces your hidden gems — the small sources that nobody is monitoring because they do not show up at the top of the volume-sorted list. These are the sites whose audiences are most aligned with your content, the writers and communities who are genuinely recommending you rather than listing you.

Once you have the list, the outreach writes itself. A referral partner whose audience stays on your site for 4 minutes and returns regularly is a relationship worth formalizing. A content exchange, a guest post, a link placement in their next relevant piece — any of these turns an organic quality referrer into a deliberate partnership.

What Your Bad Traffic Sources Are Costing You

Beyond missing the hidden gems, there is a cost to the volume sources you are currently treating as successes. If a referral source is sending 300 sessions at 6% engagement and you are investing link-building effort to maintain or grow that relationship, you are optimizing for a metric that does not correspond to business value.

The reallocation question is simple: what would happen if you redirected that same effort toward the sites whose audiences actually engage with your content?

Running the Audit

This analysis runs in a single session using Claude-in-Chrome alongside Google’s Analytics Advisor in GA4. The query sequence inverts the default referral view, surfaces your hidden quality sources, identifies your bad traffic sources with specific domain-level data, and produces a partnership opportunity list for outreach.

No SQL. No BigQuery. No data analyst. The methodology is packaged as the Books for Bots: GA4 Referral Quality Audit.

Learn more about the GA4 Referral Quality Audit →

April 26, 2026
Why Your GA4 Engagement Rate Lies to You — and What AI Referral Data Reveals About Your Real Audience

Your GA4 engagement rate is one number. But it is not one audience. It is three audiences — and they behave so differently from each other that the aggregate number actively misleads you about how your content is performing.

Here is what most GA4 users see: a site-wide engagement rate of 35%, an average session duration of 90 seconds, and a top channel list led by Organic Search. What most GA4 users miss: within that same 35% number, three AI platforms are sending traffic with engagement rates of 21%, 46%, and 64% respectively — from the exact same pages, to users with completely different intent profiles.

The AI Referral Split Nobody Is Looking At

ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot all send referral traffic to content sites. But they do not send the same user. ChatGPT users arrive, scan for a quick answer, and leave in under 30 seconds — engagement rate around 21%, well below the organic search average. Claude users arrive with research intent, read deeply, and stay for 3-4 minutes — engagement rate above 64%. Copilot users are somewhere between, arriving in planning mode, spending 1-2 minutes on civic and services content.

If you blend these three into your site-wide engagement rate, you get a number that does not represent any of your actual users. You get a mathematical average of behaviors that have nothing in common.

Why Your Engagement Rate Lies

The problem is not your content. The problem is that engagement rate without source segmentation is noise. A 35% site-wide engagement rate could mean you have excellent content reaching the wrong distribution channels. It could mean you have mediocre content propped up by one high-engagement source. It could mean your AI referral traffic is dramatically outperforming your social traffic and you have no idea.

The only way to know which is true is to break the number open by source and look at what each channel is actually delivering in terms of engaged session quality — not just volume.

The Four-Question Audit

Before you make any content or distribution decisions based on your GA4 engagement rate, ask these four questions.

Which channel sends the most engaged users — not the most users? The answer is almost never the channel driving the highest session count. In most content sites we have audited, the highest-engagement channel is sending between 8 and 40 sessions per month, not 400.

What is the engagement rate for each AI referral source individually? Blending ChatGPT and Claude traffic treats them as equivalent. They are not. One is a fact-checking audience. The other is a research audience. The content structure that serves one actively fails the other.

Which pages produce satisfied exits versus abandoned exits? A 90% exit rate with a 3-minute duration is a success. A 90% exit rate with a 4-second duration is a dead end. Engagement rate alone does not tell you which you have.

Is your engagement rate rising or falling week-over-week from AI sources? AI referral traffic is growing on most content sites in 2026. If yours is flat or declining, you are losing ground in a channel that is becoming structurally important.

What This Reveals About Your Real Audience

When you segment your GA4 engagement rate by source and run the AI referral breakdown specifically, a picture emerges that the aggregate number completely hides. Your real audience — the people actually reading and acting on your content — is smaller and more specific than your total traffic suggests. It is concentrated in a few sources, a few content types, and in the case of Claude traffic specifically, a few geographic clusters that reflect the academic and professional demographics of that user base.

This is not a problem. It is a targeting signal. It tells you where to invest content development effort and which audience to write for on every new piece.

The Methodology Behind This Analysis

The behavioral profiles in this article come from five live sessions using Claude-in-Chrome to interrogate Google’s Analytics Advisor inside GA4 on a real property. The query architecture — the specific sequence of questions and the capture protocol — is packaged as the Books for Bots: GA4 AI Referral Audit Kit.

It runs in four sessions, requires no SQL, no BigQuery access, and no data analyst. You need Claude-in-Chrome, Editor access to a GA4 property with Analytics Advisor enabled, and approximately 90 minutes. The output is a complete per-AI behavioral profile of your traffic and a content variant framework for acting on it.

Learn more about the GA4 AI Referral Audit Kit →

April 26, 2026
Books for Bots: GA4 Time Intelligence Kit
BOOKS FOR BOTS — GA4 SERIES — BOOK 02

GA4 Time Intelligence Kit

When your best traffic arrives. Day-of-week and hour-of-day patterns that tell you when to publish, when to promote, and when your audience is actually paying attention.

15 minutes
Average session duration for 10PM–11PM visitors — your hidden audience

COMING SOON — $27

Most Teams Publish When It’s Convenient

This kit tells you when your audience is actually paying attention — and those two things are rarely the same. One session against Analytics Advisor reveals your peak engagement windows by day and hour, your dead zones, and a hidden late-night audience almost no one is writing for.

FIELD FINDING — LIVE SESSION

Wednesday produced the highest engagement rate and longest average session duration. Saturday and Sunday dropped below 20% engagement. The gap between best and worst day is larger than most teams expect.

What’s Inside
- 7 copy-paste queries for Analytics Advisor — one session
- Day-of-week engagement ranking — all 7 days scored
- Hour-of-day peak window identification — morning, afternoon, late night
- Dead zone diagnosis — high volume, low quality windows
- Late-night audience profiling — the segment nobody is writing for
- Concrete publish timing recommendation from your actual property data
What You Need
- Claude-in-Chrome — free from Anthropic
- Editor or Analyst access to a GA4 property
- Analytics Advisor (BETA) enabled
- 30–60 minutes
THE KEY INSIGHT

The scheduling insight from this kit is immediate and free to act on. You do not need to create new content. You need to redistribute what you already have into the windows where your audience is actually paying attention.

Individual Kit — Instant PDF Download

COMING SOON — $27

No subscription.

BETTER VALUE — BUNDLE

Get All 6 Kits for $97

Every GA4 intelligence methodology in one purchase. Save $65.

$162$97

COMING SOON — SEE BUNDLE

FREE STARTER

Try Session 3 Free

Seven queries revealing your ChatGPT vs Claude vs Copilot split in under 30 minutes.

COMING SOON — FREE

Validated on live GA4 properties. April 2026.

Also in the Series

BOOK 01GA4 AI Referral Audit Kit BOOK 02GA4 Time Intelligence Kit BOOK 03GA4 Exit Intelligence Kit BOOK 04GA4 Referral Quality Audit BOOK 05GA4 New vs Returning Kit BOOK 06GA4 Search Intent Alignment

View full series + $97 bundle →
April 26, 2026
Books for Bots: GA4 Search Intent Alignment Kit
BOOKS FOR BOTS — GA4 SERIES — BOOK 06

GA4 Search Intent Alignment Kit

Are your keywords landing on the right pages? Diagnose intent mismatch between what users searched and what they found — and surface what your audience wanted and could not find.

39% misalignedOf organic landing pages delivering the wrong content for the search intent

COMING SOON — $27

A Page Can Rank Well and Still Fail

If the user searched “how to apply for X” and landed on a page about “what X is,” they bounce immediately. GA4 captures this failure even when you cannot see the original query. High organic traffic with low engagement is almost always intent mismatch in disguise.

CORE INSIGHT

Internal site search is the most underused intelligence in GA4. When a user searches your site, they are explicitly telling you what they wanted and could not find. This kit makes that signal visible and actionable.

What’s Inside
- 7 copy-paste queries for Analytics Advisor — one session
- Organic traffic to engagement mismatch identification
- Internal search term extraction — top 20 with gap analysis
- Zero-result internal search diagnosis
- Homepage navigation gap analysis
- Intent alignment score — baseline metric to track quarterly
- Content repositioning recommendation framework
What You Need
- Claude-in-Chrome — free from Anthropic
- Editor or Analyst access to a GA4 property
- Analytics Advisor (BETA) enabled
- 30–60 minutes
THE KEY INSIGHT

Internal search tells you what people search on your site after they arrived. That is a different and more valuable signal than anything a keyword tool produces — and it is sitting in your GA4 right now.

Individual Kit — Instant PDF Download

COMING SOON — $27

No subscription.

BUNDLE

Get All 6 Kits for $97

Every GA4 intelligence methodology. Save $65.

$162$97

COMING SOON

FREE STARTER

Try Session 3 Free

Seven queries revealing your ChatGPT vs Claude vs Copilot split in 30 minutes.

COMING SOON — FREE

Validated on live GA4 properties. April 2026.

Also in the Series

BOOK 01GA4 AI Referral Audit Kit BOOK 02GA4 Time Intelligence Kit BOOK 03GA4 Exit Intelligence Kit BOOK 04GA4 Referral Quality Audit BOOK 05GA4 New vs Returning Kit BOOK 06GA4 Search Intent Alignment

View full series + $97 bundle →
April 26, 2026
Books for Bots: GA4 Referral Quality Audit
BOOKS FOR BOTS — GA4 SERIES — BOOK 06

GA4 Search Intent Alignment Kit

Are your keywords landing on the right pages? Diagnose intent mismatch between what users searched and what they found — and surface what your audience wanted and could not find.

39% misalignedOf organic landing pages delivering the wrong content for the search intent

COMING SOON — $27

A Page Can Rank Well and Still Fail

If the user searched “how to apply for X” and landed on a page about “what X is,” they bounce immediately. GA4 captures this failure even when you cannot see the original query. High organic traffic with low engagement is almost always intent mismatch in disguise.

CORE INSIGHT

Internal site search is the most underused intelligence in GA4. When a user searches your site, they are explicitly telling you what they wanted and could not find. This kit makes that signal visible and actionable.

What’s Inside
- 7 copy-paste queries for Analytics Advisor — one session
- Organic traffic to engagement mismatch identification
- Internal search term extraction — top 20 with gap analysis
- Zero-result internal search diagnosis
- Homepage navigation gap analysis
- Intent alignment score — baseline metric to track quarterly
- Content repositioning recommendation framework
What You Need
- Claude-in-Chrome — free from Anthropic
- Editor or Analyst access to a GA4 property
- Analytics Advisor (BETA) enabled
- 30–60 minutes
THE KEY INSIGHT

Internal search tells you what people search on your site after they arrived. That is a different and more valuable signal than anything a keyword tool produces — and it is sitting in your GA4 right now.

Individual Kit — Instant PDF Download

COMING SOON — $27

No subscription.

BUNDLE

Get All 6 Kits for $97

Every GA4 intelligence methodology. Save $65.

$162$97

COMING SOON

FREE STARTER

Try Session 3 Free

Seven queries revealing your ChatGPT vs Claude vs Copilot split in 30 minutes.

COMING SOON — FREE

Validated on live GA4 properties. April 2026.

Also in the Series

BOOK 01GA4 AI Referral Audit Kit BOOK 02GA4 Time Intelligence Kit BOOK 03GA4 Exit Intelligence Kit BOOK 04GA4 Referral Quality Audit BOOK 05GA4 New vs Returning Kit BOOK 06GA4 Search Intent Alignment

View full series + $97 bundle →
April 26, 2026
Books for Bots: GA4 Exit Intelligence Kit
BOOKS FOR BOTS — GA4 SERIES — BOOK 03

GA4 Exit Intelligence Kit

Where users leave your site — and what it means. Distinguish satisfied exits from abandoned ones, find your dead-end pages, and map your internal linking gaps.

85% exit rate
With 3m 20s duration — a satisfied exit, not a problem to fix

COMING SOON — $27

Not All Exits Are Failures

A user who reads your guide for three minutes and then leaves got exactly what they needed. A user who hits your page and bounces in four seconds got nothing. GA4 treats them identically. This kit teaches you to tell the difference.

FIELD FINDING — LIVE SESSION

The NYC Summer Internships page has an 85% exit rate AND a 3m 20s average session. That is a satisfied exit. Adding CTAs to interrupt it would reduce performance, not improve it.

Satisfied exit.

Abandoned exit.

What’s Inside
- 7 copy-paste queries for Analytics Advisor — one session
- Satisfied vs abandoned exit classification framework
- Dead-end page audit — pages with zero internal link clicks
- Homepage navigation effectiveness score
- Internal link opportunity map — Advisor generates specific page pairings
- Exit-to-content-gap mapping for abandoned pages
What You Need
- Claude-in-Chrome — free from Anthropic
- Editor or Analyst access to a GA4 property
- Analytics Advisor (BETA) enabled
- 30–60 minutes
THE KEY INSIGHT

The internal link fix is the highest ROI action from this kit. No new content, no design changes, no developer. Add one sentence with a link on an abandoned exit page pointing to a relevant high-engagement page.

Individual Kit — Instant PDF Download

COMING SOON — $27

No subscription.

BUNDLE — ALL 6 KITS

Get All 6 Kits for $97

Every GA4 intelligence methodology in one purchase. Save $65.

$162$97

COMING SOON

FREE STARTER

Try Session 3 Free

Seven queries revealing your ChatGPT vs Claude vs Copilot split in under 30 minutes. No purchase required.

COMING SOON — FREE

Validated on live GA4 properties. April 2026.

Also in the Series

BOOK 01GA4 AI Referral Audit Kit BOOK 02GA4 Time Intelligence Kit BOOK 03GA4 Exit Intelligence Kit BOOK 04GA4 Referral Quality Audit BOOK 05GA4 New vs Returning Kit BOOK 06GA4 Search Intent Alignment

View full series + $97 bundle →
April 26, 2026
Books for Bots: GA4 AI Referral Audit Kit
Books for Bots — GA4 Series — Book 01

GA4 AI Referral Audit Kit

The complete 4-session Claude-in-Chrome methodology for extracting per-AI audience intelligence from Google Analytics 4 — and turning it into content every AI model cites.

64% vs 21%
Claude.ai engagement rate vs ChatGPT — same site, same pages

COMING SOON — $27

CORE FINDING

AI citations are downstream of search quality, not upstream. Pages that win Bing and Yahoo with long-form depth get cited by AI models as a derivative effect.

What’s Inside
- Full 4-session query architecture — 26 queries, copy-paste ready
- Pre-flight checklist and capture protocol for each session
- Per-AI behavioral profiles: ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot
- Content variant framework — 3 structural templates, one per AI retrieval pattern
- Flags to escalate before your next content sprint
- The cross-AI page overlap query — your highest-confidence GEO signal
What You Need
- Claude-in-Chrome extension — free from Anthropic
- Editor or Analyst access to a GA4 property
- Analytics Advisor (BETA) enabled — English-language accounts
- Approximately 30–60 minutes
THE KEY INSIGHT

AI citations are downstream of search quality — not upstream. The path to getting cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot is not to optimize for AI retrieval patterns. It is to build pages that win on Bing and Yahoo with enough depth that AI models treat them as authoritative sources.

Individual Kit — Instant PDF Download

COMING SOON — $27

No subscription. One-time purchase.

BETTER VALUE

Get All 6 Kits for $97

The complete Books for Bots library. Every GA4 intelligence methodology in one purchase.

$162 separately$97

COMING SOON — SEE BUNDLE

Developed and validated across live sessions on a real GA4 property. April 2026.

Also in the Books for Bots Series

BOOK 01GA4 AI Referral Audit Kit
BOOK 02GA4 Time Intelligence Kit
BOOK 03GA4 Exit Intelligence Kit
BOOK 04GA4 Referral Quality Audit
BOOK 05GA4 New vs Returning Kit
BOOK 06GA4 Search Intent Alignment

View full series + $97 bundle →
April 26, 2026
Books for Bots: What Happens When You Let Claude Interrogate Your GA4 Data

For the past several weeks I have been running a live experiment on helpnewyork.com: using Claude-in-Chrome to interrogate Google’s Analytics Advisor inside GA4, session by session, until I had a complete behavioral profile of every AI platform sending traffic to the site.

What came out of it is not what I expected. I expected traffic data. I got a content strategy.

The Setup

Claude-in-Chrome is Anthropic’s browser extension that lets Claude operate directly inside your browser — reading pages, clicking elements, filling inputs, capturing output. Analytics Advisor is Google’s Gemini-powered chat interface built into GA4, available to English-language accounts since December 2025. It answers natural language questions about your property data with charts, tables, and narrative interpretation.

The combination is unusual. You are using one AI (Claude) to systematically interrogate another AI (Gemini) about your site’s data, then synthesizing what comes back into strategy. The token budget for the heavy data reasoning stays inside Google’s infrastructure. Claude handles the query architecture, the capture protocol, and the synthesis.

I ran four structured sessions across two sittings, using a specific sequence of queries built to extract progressively deeper signal. Session 1 established baseline traffic. Session 2 closed gaps and confirmed AI referral data existed. Session 3 was the AI deep dive. Session 4 was velocity and geography.

What the Data Showed

Three AI platforms were sending meaningful traffic to helpnewyork.com during the 28-day window: ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot. The behavioral profiles were so different from each other that treating them as a single “AI traffic” segment would have produced wrong conclusions.

Claude.ai traffic showed a 64% engagement rate and an average session duration of over 3 minutes. The dominant landing page was an NYC Summer Internships guide, accounting for over 60% of all Claude sessions. Geographic concentration was academic: Ithaca (Cornell), State College (Penn State), Washington DC. The users arriving from Claude were reading to act — they needed specific information, they found it, they stayed.

ChatGPT traffic showed a 21% engagement rate and an average session of 24 seconds. The top landing page was a cherry blossom guide. The users were fact-grabbing: they asked ChatGPT where to see cherry blossoms in New York, got a citation, clicked through, confirmed the location, and left. The content served its purpose in under half a minute.

Copilot traffic was between the two: 46% engagement, roughly 2-minute sessions, desktop-heavy, concentrated in New York’s suburbs. The top pages were civic services — SNAP benefits, tenant rights, transit discounts. These users were in planning mode, researching before they decided or applied.

The Finding That Reframes GEO

The cross-AI page overlap query was the most important one in the entire four-session arc. I asked Analytics Advisor which pages appeared in the top landing pages for more than one AI source. Only one real content page appeared in all three: the cherry blossom guide.

The obvious interpretation is that the cherry blossom guide was “AI-optimized.” The actual interpretation, once you look at the full traffic breakdown, is the opposite. Bing drove 59 sessions to that page. Yahoo drove 16 at 75% engagement and a 3-minute 46-second average session. DuckDuckGo drove 35. The combined AI traffic to that page was 32 sessions — 17% of total. The AI platforms were citing it because traditional search engines had already validated it as the highest-quality answer in the index.

AI citations are downstream of search quality, not upstream. The path to getting cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot is not to optimize for AI retrieval patterns. It is to build pages that win on Bing and Yahoo with enough depth that AI models treat them as authoritative sources. The GEO play is a traditional SEO play with better content.

The Content Strategy That Follows

Once you have the per-AI behavioral profiles, you have a content variant framework. The same article can be written in three structural architectures, each tuned to how one AI model retrieves and presents information.

The Claude variant is dense and process-oriented. Headers, eligibility criteria, numbered steps, official program names. Built for the student or researcher who arrived with a specific question and needs a complete answer they can act on.

The ChatGPT variant is a scannable list. Named items, one specific detail per item, direct answer in the first two sentences. Built for the user who will spend 24 seconds on the page and needs the answer immediately or they’re gone.

The Copilot variant is comparison and planning framing. What to know before you go, Option A versus Option B, cost context, logistics. Built for the desktop user doing research before they make a decision.

The core article is the same. The architecture is different. The AI that cites you depends on which structure you used.

The Methodology Is the Product

The query sequence I developed across these four sessions is a repeatable extraction methodology. It works on any GA4 property with Analytics Advisor enabled. The intelligence it produces — per-AI audience profiles, geographic signals, velocity trends, cross-AI content overlap — is not available through DataForSEO, SpyFu, or GSC. It requires Gemini’s reasoning layer operating on top of your property data, orchestrated by a structured query architecture.

I have packaged the complete methodology as a downloadable kit: the full query architecture across all four sessions, the capture protocol, the content variant framework, and the flags to escalate before your next content sprint. It is called Books for Bots: GA4 AI Referral Audit Kit.

The free version covers Session 3 alone — the AI deep dive queries that surface your ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot traffic split. That alone will show you something most site owners have never seen: which AI is sending them traffic, to which pages, and how engaged those users actually are.

The full kit covers all four sessions and includes the content variant framework that translates the behavioral data into a writing system.

Both are available at tygartmedia.com. What you do with the data after that is yours.

April 26, 2026
Hood Canal Salmon Run 5K Returns to Belfair June 6 — Registration Open at The Salmon Center
Six Saturdays from now, our corner of Hood Canal will fill up with running shoes, dog leashes, strollers, and a whole lot of neighbors who care about salmon. The third annual Hood Canal Salmon Run 5K is on for Saturday, June 6, 2026 at The Salmon Center in Belfair, and registration is open right now at pnwsalmoncenter.org. Check-in opens at 8 a.m. and the staggered run/walk start is 9 a.m.

If you’ve ever pulled into the gravel lot at 600 NE Roessel Road and walked out to the Union River Estuary on a clear morning, you already know what kind of course this is. Flat. Unpaved. Quiet enough to hear the geese. The 5K loops around the estuary on the Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group’s working salmon farm and conservation property — the same property our community has been helping HCSEG restore for more than thirty years.

What the run actually pays for

Every entry, every t-shirt, every dollar from the Hood Canal Salmon Run goes to two summer day-camp programs that quietly do some of the best youth work in North Mason: Farm Stewards for kids ages 7 to 11, and Explore the Fjord for kids 12 to 16. Both camps run out of The Salmon Center campus in Belfair. Both rely on community donations to keep tuition reachable for local families.

That’s the whole math: a Saturday morning trail run pays for a kid from Belfair, Allyn, Tahuya, or Shelton to spend a week of summer learning the watershed they live in. Hard to beat that exchange rate.

The details you need
- Date: Saturday, June 6, 2026
- Location: The Salmon Center, 600 NE Roessel Rd, Belfair, WA 98528
- Check-in: 8:00 a.m.
- Run/walk starts: 9:00 a.m. (staggered)
- Course: 5K, flat, unpaved trail around the Union River Estuary
- Youth policy: Runners 14 and under must be accompanied by an adult
- Weather: Rain or shine
- Register: pnwsalmoncenter.org/hood-canal-salmon-run
2026 race t-shirts are sold separately from registration; every shirt purchase rolls back into youth environmental education. There’s also a sponsor wall on the Salmon Run page if your business wants its logo standing alongside the rest of the Hood Canal supporters.

Want to volunteer instead of run?

HCSEG runs this race on volunteer power. Course marshals, check-in tables, water stops — all neighbors. The 5K Volunteer Coordinator is Almi, and the email to send is americorps1@pnwsalmoncenter.org. If you’ve got a Saturday morning to spare and want to see what the Salmon Center actually looks like behind the scenes, this is the easy way in.

Why we’re spotlighting this one

The Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group has been one of the quiet pillars of our town for decades — operating out of Belfair, running Salmon in the Classroom in our schools, hosting story times for babies on their campus, and now anchoring Sweetwater Creek Waterwheel Park across Highway 3 from the Theler Wetlands. The Salmon Run is their annual ask of the community that they’ve been giving to for years. Six weeks is plenty of time to train up a 5K, talk a friend into signing up with you, or pencil June 6 onto the calendar as a volunteer day.

See you on the estuary.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is the 2026 Hood Canal Salmon Run?

Saturday, June 6, 2026. Check-in opens at 8 a.m. and the staggered 5K run/walk starts at 9 a.m. at The Salmon Center, 600 NE Roessel Rd, Belfair.

Where does the money go?

Proceeds support HCSEG’s two youth summer camps held at The Salmon Center: Farm Stewards (ages 7–11) and Explore the Fjord (ages 12–16).

Is the course stroller- or dog-friendly?

The course is a flat, unpaved trail loop around the Union River Estuary. Runners 14 and under must be accompanied by an adult. The race runs rain or shine.

How do I volunteer?

Email Salmon Run Volunteer Coordinator Almi at americorps1@pnwsalmoncenter.org.
April 26, 2026
What Everett’s NR-MHC Zone Means If You Live at Creekside, Fairway Estates, or Any of the Seven Mobile Home Parks: A 2026 Resident’s Guide
What does Everett’s proposed NR-MHC zone mean if I live in one of the seven mobile home parks? If you live at Creekside, Fairway Estates, Lago De Plata Villa, Loganberry, Mobile Country Club, Silver Shores Senior, or Westridge — the City of Everett is about to put your community on the zoning map in a way it has never been before. The new Neighborhood Residential – Manufactured Home Community (NR-MHC) zone restricts redevelopment of your park’s land into apartments, retail, or any other use without an explicit, public rezone. The Everett City Council holds the public hearing on the ordinance on Wednesday, May 6, 2026, at 6:30 p.m. at 3002 Wetmore Avenue. Show up if you can.

This is the resident-side read of the NR-MHC zone complete guide. The core walks through the ordinance and the Comprehensive Plan policies it implements. This one walks through what it actually means for the residents of the seven parks.

The basic protection, in plain language

If you own your manufactured home but rent the lot, your housing security has historically depended on whether the park owner decided to sell to a redeveloper. The standard pattern in Puget Sound has been simple and unkind: a park sells, residents get notice to relocate, and the land becomes apartments or townhomes. Moving a manufactured home is often more expensive than the home is worth. Many older units cannot legally be relocated under current code at all. The home equity you carry — even if modest — disappears in the relocation.

The NR-MHC zone does not stop a sale. It does change what a buyer can do with the land after the sale. A buyer who wants to redevelop the parcel into apartments, retail, or any other non-manufactured-home-community use has to go through an explicit rezone — a slow, public, politically visible process — rather than the quieter administrative paths that have historically made park redevelopment relatively frictionless.

That changes the math for park owners weighing a sale to a redeveloper. It does not eliminate redevelopment risk; it raises the friction.

The seven parks the ordinance would cover
- Creekside Mobile Home Park — 5810 Fleming Street
- Fairway Estates Mobile Home Park — 1427 100th Street
- Lago De Plata Villa — 620 112th Street
- Loganberry Mobile Home Park — 9931 18th Avenue W.
- Mobile Country Club — 1415 84th Street
- Silver Shores Senior Mobile Home Park — 11622 Silver Lake Road
- Westridge Mobile Home Park — 7701 Hardeson Road
Several of these are 55+ communities. Several have been in place for decades. None of them, until now, have had a zoning designation that says “this is a manufactured home community and that is the use we are protecting.”

What does not change

It is worth being clear about what the NR-MHC zone is and is not.

It does not regulate lot rents. Rent increases between you and the park owner are governed by Washington state landlord-tenant law and any specific manufactured home community statutes — not by this zoning ordinance.

It does not change park ownership. The park owner still owns the park. Sale to another owner who continues operating it as a manufactured home community is unaffected.

It does not change park rules. Internal park rules, lot leases, age restrictions, and pet policies are governed by your lot lease and park rules, not by city zoning.

It does not stop a sale or transfer. The protective zoning is on the use, not on the transaction.

It is not permanent. A future City Council can amend or rescind the zone, just as the current council is creating it. The protection is real but it lives inside the political process.

What the May 6 hearing is for

The public hearing on Wednesday, May 6, 2026, at 6:30 p.m. in council chambers at 3002 Wetmore Avenue is the formal opportunity for residents, neighbors, advocates, and park owners to address the council before adoption.

If you live in one of the seven parks, the most useful thing you can do is show up — or submit written comment in advance through the city’s standard public-comment channels. The council is implementing two specific Comprehensive Plan policies (HO-10 and HO-19) through this ordinance; testimony from the residents the policies are designed to protect carries real weight in that record.

If you cannot attend in person, ask a neighbor to read your written comment, contact your council member directly, or work with a neighborhood organization or housing advocate to ensure your voice is in the record.

What to ask, what to bring

If you plan to testify, useful frames include:
- How long you have lived in the park, and what the park means to your household
- What the equity in your manufactured home represents to your finances
- What the lot rent in your park is compared to nearby apartment rents — that is the affordability story in concrete numbers
- Why a stable, protected community matters for older residents, fixed-income households, or 55+ neighbors
- What questions you have about the long-term durability of the protection
You do not need a polished speech. The lived experience is the testimony.

How this fits with the broader anti-displacement work in Everett

The NR-MHC zone is part of a broader effort across the city to slow displacement before larger market and infrastructure pressures arrive. Two parallel pieces:
- Stations Unidos — the rebranded community development corporation focused on Casino Road and the Everett Station District ahead of Sound Transit Link. See our complete Stations Unidos guide.
- The City of Everett’s broader Comprehensive Plan implementation across all 21 neighborhoods.
Read together, the NR-MHC zone is the regulatory side of the strategy. Stations Unidos and the Housing Authority are the acquisition and development sides. Each addresses a different slice of the same problem.

The honest read

The NR-MHC zone is one of the strongest structural anti-displacement tools the city has put on the table for manufactured home communities. It is not a guarantee — no zoning is — but it materially raises the friction on redevelopment and gives residents a meaningful structural backstop. The May 6 public hearing is the moment to get it on the record. If you live in one of the seven parks, your voice is the one the council most needs to hear.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the NR-MHC zone?

NR-MHC stands for Neighborhood Residential – Manufactured Home Community. It is a new zoning category restricting the underlying land of seven specific Everett mobile home parks against redevelopment into other uses without an explicit rezone.

When is the public hearing?

Wednesday, May 6, 2026, at 6:30 p.m. in council chambers at 3002 Wetmore Avenue.

Will my lot rent change because of this?

No. The NR-MHC zone does not regulate lot rents. Rent between you and the park owner remains governed by your lot lease and Washington state landlord-tenant law.

Can my park owner still sell the park?

Yes. The zone does not prohibit sale or transfer. It restricts what a buyer can do with the land afterward — specifically, redeveloping it into a non-manufactured-home-community use requires an explicit rezone.

Can a future council remove the zone?

Yes. A future City Council can amend or rescind the zone through the same legislative process. The protection is durable but lives inside the political process.

What if I cannot attend the May 6 hearing?

Submit written comment through the city’s standard public-comment channels in advance of the hearing. You can also contact your council member directly. Working with a neighborhood organization, housing advocate, or trusted neighbor to make sure your voice is in the record is a strong fallback.

How do I find out my parcel’s current zoning?

The City of Everett Planning Department is the authoritative source. Their public counter and online zoning map will show your parcel’s current designation and the proposed NR-MHC change. Contact Planning at (425) 257-8810 or visit everettwa.gov for current zoning information.

Does this affect the city’s broader budget or my taxes?

The NR-MHC ordinance is a zoning code amendment with no direct tax or budget line item. The broader anti-displacement strategy interacts with the city’s housing programs and Comprehensive Plan implementation, which sit inside the larger 2027 budget conversation covered in our complete budget guide.
April 26, 2026