At the Sept. 12 Snoqualmie City Council meeting, Valley cities partnered to receive an economic development grant and a request for proposals for an online public park reservation system was approved.

According to the city’s staff report, the Port of Seattle has an economic development partnership program that makes $962,000 of matching funds available to King County cities. Senior Planner Ben Swanson explained the program allocates $1 of grant funding per resident. In order to maximize funding, Snoqualmie, Carnation, Duvall, and Fall City will pool their populations together and will use the funds to promote Valley tourism.

The city council approved supporting the grant with $4,500 in matching funds for the $12,000 grant request.

“We all decided to go in together on this and take our money and dedicate it to tourism programs throughout the Valley,” Swanson said at the meeting. “One thing that’s already been done … the Carnation Chamber of Commerce received a $10,000 grant, it was for these flyers that are currently up at the Snoqualmie Falls and they have a little map showing the Valley and businesses throughout all four cities.”

The 2017 version of that flyer is one of Snoqualmie’s planned projects for the grant money.

After a series of workshops hosted by Mountains to Sound Greenway and attended by local cities, chambers of commerce and business owners, Valley representatives discussed creating a group to help promote business and agriculture in the area. This grant is one of the ways that group is raising money for their projects.

Swanson said the group, which also includes North Bend, is aiming to formalize in February of 2017.

The city council also approved a request for proposals for an online parks and special event permit registration service. This proposed online resource would allow people to more easily submit requests to reserve public parks and register for special event permits and would reduce the workload of the city employees tasked with managing those requests.

“In 2015 we had over 1,800 individual applications or requests for parks, reservations, including leagues for soccer fields, basketball courts and it’s become extremely cumbersome,” said Tomm Munro, administrative assistant in Parks and Public Works. “It’s very time extensive for the staff, it’s also prone to errors because we only have three people managing this.”

“With the new software, we are not reinventing anything. Cities have been using this for years and years, this is a matter of going out and finding the best application for us and plugging in our specific criteria and letting it run. It’s almost like a plug and play as opposed to a full blown asset management software. We could really use this.”

The next Snoqualmie City Council meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 26, at Snoqualmie City Hall.