The city of Carnation’s Public Works staff is four people strong — five if including Director of Operations and Public Works Lora Wilmes.

The small team oversees and manages every aspect of roads, parks, stormwater, wastewater and its own water system for the town of around 2,300 people.

“I always tell them, if we’re doing our job well, no one will ever think about what we do,” Wilmes said. “If you can flush a toilet or turn on your water, that’s because of the crew and the work that they’re doing.”

This is generally the mindset of the Snoqualmie Valley’s public works departments. Made up of quiet achievers who keep their noses to the proverbial and literal grindstone, public works is the backbone of a city’s operations.

But while public works crews may take pride in working unnoticed, Duvall City Administrator Cynthia McNabb — along with leaders in other towns — wants more residents to see and appreciate all they do.

“When the city faced historic flooding, the public works team was onsite to ensure that any emergency in the city could be handled quickly and effectively. When there is even a hint of snow in the forecast, we have public works in the city as early as 3 a.m. to be on standby,” McNabb said. “The pride that the team has in their work is unmatched.”

In each town, there is at least one public works staff member on call 24/7. During December’s flood event, some of the staff barely slept.

Carnation has its own water district, which covers city limits and the areas just north and south of town. The city is also unique in that it has a vacuum system, rather than a gravity-based one, because Carnation is so flat.

The system requires “a little more hand-holding” than others might, Wilmes said. And because of its vacuum properties, the sewer system can get backlogged if there is a lot of water intake, like during heavy rains.

Wilmes said that in December, there was also concern of trees coming down and blocking access to the water source.

On just a few hours of sleep, staffers were out in the field, monitoring the vacuum, manually draining catch basins that couldn’t keep up, checking every storm drain in town and filling sandbags. The small team went two days with no breaks, Wilmes said.

When Carnation became an island because of the flooding, some staff who don’t live in town ended up sleeping on air mattresses in City Hall. The city has since built a bunkhouse in preparation for future, similar situations.

“They take pride and care about the city so much that they knew that they were going to get flooded in, and they were like, we will be there,” Wilmes said. “I don’t think we would be able to do it without a really good, hands-on crew.”

Carnation Public Works out in the field. Photo courtesy of the city of Carnation

In addition to managing natural disasters and completing day-to-day duties, public works staff are involved in development and capital projects. They deal with permitting, make inspections, help contractors connect to city systems and more.

But they get it all done.

“There’s something about working in a small city. I think we have an amazing crew,” Wilmes said. “I think we also have very passionate and eager residents.”

Residents take initiative in telling the city if something needs fixing — a new pothole, a road sign down, a strange noise in a “candy cane” pipe (above-ground pipes that allow airflow to the vacuum system).

“Our public works teams are the eyes and ears of our city, but there’s only four of them and myself, so we can only see so much,” she said.

In North Bend, residents are also extra sets of “eyes and ears” for Public Works, according to Susan Welland, wastewater treatment plant manager. Residents can be of even more help by growing their understanding of the utilities and infrastructure North Bend manages, she said.

North Bend has one of the larger public works teams with 28 staff, including management and office personnel. They manage parks, streets, water and wastewater, with 32 miles of sewer pipe in town.

There are two staff members on call at all times: one specifically for wastewater, and one for everything else.

One of the most-involved things North Bend Public Works manages is its wastewater treatment plant, where Welland said a top priority is keeping the environment clean.

“That’s what we’re all about is making sure that our effluent quality does not harm the environment in any way,” she said. “We are doing everything we can daily to monitor and see if there’s any changes that will give us an indication that things are going in that direction. And we make process control changes way before they even get close.”

It’s a lot of work, but it’s work Welland is passionate about.

“I find it fascinating because it is a biological system, and it’s living, and it changes depending on the time of year,” she said. “Once we get different types of weather or hydraulic overloading due to flows, all those things make our job different.”

This was especially true during the December flood, where the amount of water coming into the treatment plant put the infrastructure at risk.

“My facility takes in a certain amount of flow, typically half-million gallons per day. This flood event was 10 times that, so 5 million a day,” she said. “Our major focus … is environmental health, safety of the crew, and making sure that we are meeting our permit effluent concentrations and and meeting those permit numbers. We did do that, but it was a lot of juggling of the plant.”

Every experience like this is a learning opportunity, and this time Welland’s crew learned new ways of manipulating flows within the plant so that it wouldn’t fail. They also learned how to work even better as a team.

“That’s always something that we’re improving on anyway, and in a stressful situation, it just kind of brings that more into [the forefront],” she said.

The city of Duvall’s wastewater treatment plant. Grace Gorenflo/Valley Record

‘We try to recruit folks who want to be here’

In Duvall, Public Works Director Steve Leniszewski attributes his team’s success to the combined years of experience amongst staff, as well as a true desire to do the job well.

“Obviously the better staff you have, the better product here in the end,” he said. “We try to recruit folks who want to be here, and it’s not a hard sell because we have a ton of variety.”

Leniszewski said he directs seven different lines of business throughout his department of 27 people — a variety only possible because of Duvall’s size, not despite it. Larger towns outside the Valley may have separate parks departments, for example.

Duvall Public Works also cross-trains staff members, with a large focus in general on training and education, Leniszewski said. He himself is a state-licensed engineer, and his team as a whole holds many different licenses. Wastewater treatment plants, in particular, require a lot of licenses, he said.

Unlike North Bend, downtown Duvall doesn’t have to worry much about becoming flooded. It sits high enough up that, like Carnation, the city just becomes an island when there’s flooding.

Aside from monitoring road closures, Leniszewski said the December 2025 flood event involved a lot of “triaging” situations where people were trying to get in or out of town when they should have been staying put.

A big advancement to the Duvall Public Works Department in recent years is the addition of the emergency management coordinator, a position held by Luke Eckert.

During an emergency, Eckert consistently watches all of the forecasts and data available to him, Leniszewski said, and distributes that information. Eckert can also reach out to his contacts and get specific forecasts for city limits, which are helpful as flood severity varies throughout the Valley.

While Eckert and the rest of the team try to communicate with residents as efficiently as they can, there are always people who are going to complain about things around town, especially on social media, Leniszewski said.

“That’s kind of the hardest thing,” he said. “You have to keep morale up with staff because they can get bogged down with it too.”

On the other hand, Duvall’s public works staff have positive, public-facing experiences as they help with town events. City Administrator McNabb said public works is critical to events like Splash Day, Duvall Days, the New Year’s Eve celebration and the Summerstage concert series.

Public works staff members across the Valley do everything in their job description and more, City Hall staff say.

“Every single member of the Duvall Public Works team cares deeply about this community,” McNabb said. “This is a very special team.”