Snohomish County

Welcome to The Story Place, a storytelling podcast from the YMCA of Snohomish County.

Here, we share real stories of people, place, and connection.

Past to present, these are stories of belonging, growth, and impact.

All right, so our next guest is a sports guy, a very good golfer, fantasy football enthusiast, someone who believes coffee is better with an extra shot, and snacks are basically always a good idea.

Our teammate, we've also seen how he values connection and brings thoughtful perspective to people and the work around him.

Please welcome Associate Director of Marketing Operations for the YMCA of Snohomish County, Zach Jagel.

Thanks for being here.

Are you also a major league baseball fantasy enthusiast?

Yeah.

So I grew up in South Snohomish County.

I graduated from Meadowdale High School back when they were the chiefs.

Yeah.

And he became a firefighter here.

And I continued on, like I said, in journalism and doing communications or reporting and editing.

And there was a job opening, um, here in South Snohomish County at my childhood newspaper, the enterprise newspapers.

And so that was the weekly of the Herald at the time.

From skunks to goats.

Snohomish County Sheriff's deputies got their goat.

They were called to a neighborhood where an aggressive goat was on the loose, ramming into people.

The goat had horns that were a foot long.

And we took off.

And I went to Snohomish County.

Well, one of the reasons, one of the people that led to a 37% vacancy rate in Seattle for the business community right now.

Correct.

Then I got a slot for a sniper school.

And the only place I could find breakdancing lessons were in a sketchy barn in Snohomish County.

And I was like, I'm going to get strung up in this barn.

This is weird.

But because it didn't have a name, it needed one.

So legislators are like, all right, well, the school district boundaries pretty much stretch from shore to shore, meaning Puget Sound, like you just referenced, and Lake Washington and line to line because the old Seattle city limits were 85th Street to Snohomish County line.

So that's what they get it like shoreline.

I

The rules don't say transfer stations can't be located much closer.

In fact, we cited a transfer station in Snohomish County right next to Payne Field.

Literally on the Payne Field grounds, we have cited a very large 1500 ton a day station.

But to do that, we had to jump through a number of hoops with the FAA, even though their rules don't specifically say mentioned transfer stations, we still had to do a number of things to convince them that we weren't going to attract birds.