The Mile-Long Loop in Mill Creek That Isn't Actually a Park
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
"Stepping into the Penny Creek Natural Area feels like entering another world," Mill Creek resident Jeff Doan told The Daily Herald back in March. Anyone who has walked the mile-long loop off 35th Avenue Southeast knows what he means. Beaver-gnawed stumps line the water. Cormorants perch on downed logs. Fungi push up through the mud after a wet week, and if you time it right in early summer, someone will stop you to point out where the salmonberries are ripening.
What most people walking that loop probably don't know is that none of it belongs to the city. Penny Creek Natural Area, roughly 60 acres of wetland tucked into the northeast corner of Mill Creek, is privately owned by The Farm by Vintage, the apartment complex next door. The trail stays open because the owner has chosen to keep it open, not because Mill Creek residents have any guaranteed right to be there. That arrangement almost ended quietly last year, and the fact that it didn't is the more interesting story.
Back in 2019, The Farm by Vintage bought the Penny Creek parcel as part of a development agreement with the city. In exchange for a reduced wetland buffer on its own construction, the developer agreed to maintain the natural area and keep it open to the public for five years. Buried in that same agreement was a second clause: after those five years, the city could take ownership of the land at no cost, but if the city didn't act, the owner could close public access altogether.
That five-year window closed in November 2025. Nobody moved. The land sat in limbo, still walkable, still maintained day to day by the property management company, but with no legal guarantee it would stay that way. Mill Creek's Public Works Director, Mike Todd, confirmed to The Herald in March that the city and the developer would spend 2026 sorting out whether the city wanted the property at all. In other words, the trail everyone in the neighborhood already treats as a park was, for months, one unanswered phone call away from a fence.
Penny Creek is the largest tributary feeding North Creek, which flows on to the Sammamish River and eventually Lake Washington. Pilchuck Audubon Society president Bill Derry told the city council that more than 140 bird species have been documented at Penny Creek, a striking count for a wetland this size. A separate fish passage project already underway on State Route 527, where Penny Creek runs through an undersized culvert, is scheduled for completion by 2027, the same year the city hopes to take ownership of the wetland upstream. The timing is coincidental, but it means two different agencies are quietly working on the same creek at the same time.
None of that ecological detail would matter to most residents if the loop weren't also a genuinely pleasant place to spend an hour. That combination, a working wetland that also happens to be a good walk, is what pulled a volunteer group together in the first place. Doan started an online community in 2025 with a goal of fifty members. By this spring it had grown past 350. Every two months, the group gathers for a cleanup, working the mile loop for trash that has ranged from small bits of plastic to, memorably, a discarded television and a toilet.
On April 28, 2026, the question finally reached the Mill Creek City Council. The vote to authorize staff to negotiate an ownership agreement with The Farm by Vintage passed 4 to 2, with one abstention. Council members Connie Allison and Vince Cavaleri voted no, both citing uncertainty over maintenance costs. Council member John Steckler abstained, saying he supported the idea in principle but wanted more financial detail before committing.
The numbers on the table were rough. Todd estimated $25,000 a year in ongoing maintenance, a figure he described as preliminary while the city waited on its new landscape contractor for something firmer. Startup costs, including cleanup work and a small boat to pull debris out of the water, were estimated at another $50,000. Cavaleri didn't hide his skepticism. "The $25,000 number is just, I think we're kind of winging it," he said at the meeting. The city would also give up roughly $28,000 a year in property tax currently paid by The Farm by Vintage, mostly tied to stormwater management on the site.
Council member Sean Paddock, who voted yes, framed the tradeoff differently. "We quibble about a lot of nickels and dimes here, and then when there's an opportunity to do something big, get back to the nickels and dimes," he said, arguing that a rare chance to secure open space shouldn't get lost in a budget line. Mayor Stephanie Vignal, Mayor Pro Tem Melissa Duque, council member Tannis Golebiewski, and Paddock made up the majority. If the final agreement holds, the city expects to formally take ownership in January 2027.
As of the most recent public council recaps, through the July 28 meeting, the final ownership agreement hadn't come back to the council for the sign-off Todd said would happen sometime in summer 2026. That's worth sitting with for a second: a resource this popular, this documented, and this close to a decision is still, technically, waiting on paperwork between a city and a property manager.
Here's the sequence so far, pieced together from council records and reporting:
If that summer deadline slips, it wouldn't be the first time a municipal timeline moved. What's notable is that public access currently rests on the same arrangement it always has: goodwill from a private owner, not a city guarantee.
One detail says more about where this is headed than any council vote. By June 2026, city council recaps were already referring to Doan as chair of the city's own Park and Recreation Board. The resident who started a Facebook group with a goal of fifty members in 2025 now sits on the official body that will help decide how Penny Creek gets managed if the city takes it over. The group has also told the city it plans to keep running its bimonthly cleanups regardless of who owns the land, an offer that directly lowers the cost case against acquisition that Allison and Cavaleri raised.
That's the piece of this story that outlasts any single vote. A place people already treat as public space, cared for consistently enough that the volunteer group now sits inside the institution deciding its future, has a different kind of momentum than a line item on a capital plan. Mill Creek has other conversations underway about how it grows, from the South Town Center redevelopment to ongoing annexation talks, and green space keeps surfacing in all of them as something residents don't want traded away for density. Penny Creek is the clearest, most specific test case of that instinct so far.
If you walk the loop this fall, nothing will look different. The beavers will still be working, the birds will still be there, and the trash will still need picking up every couple of months. The only thing that's changed is that more of your neighbors now know exactly how fragile that ordinary Saturday walk actually was, and how close it came to needing a different kind of Saturday altogether.
If you're thinking about what it actually means to live somewhere, day to day, not just what a listing says about it, that's the kind of detail worth knowing before you sign anything. Jessica Gustelius spends her time in these neighborhoods long before and long after a transaction, and she's always glad to talk about what makes a place work the way it does. Let's Connect.
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