By Alia Sinclair

Tuesday night’s (May 28, 2025) SeaTac City Council meeting began with a comment from Katrina Dohn, an Area Manager for TNT Fireworks, sharing the news that — due to a transition in the permit department at the vendor in December—the deadline for applications to allow firework sales in SeaTac had been missed.

Dohn said:

“I am here tonight to humbly ask for mercy for a SNAFU that happened with the firework sites that happen in SeaTac that support local non-profits. And I am ashamed that I’m even having to ask this. We had a transition at TNT this year in our permit department. Our permit officer left in, I think, December, and a new permit officer came. We did not know that the old permit officer had not updated the list of permit deadlines for cities, with the changes SeaTac had made. We thought we were early. We were going to start working on SeaTac in early May, and to our horror, we discovered there was a change, and we had missed the deadline by a couple of days. We were appalled. It was one hundred percent a TNT error. We own it. We eat it.”

Dohn’s primary concern was that the missed deadline would affect the work of local non-profits who depend on sales from firework stands for funding.

“My heart is absolutely broken that some non-profits could lose the funding they had budgeted and that is then going to impact the clients that they serve,” Dohn continued. “So, I am here to ask if there is any other option for response to the error, the TNT error—again, we fully own it—so that TNT takes the cost. Not the non-profits, not the clients, because they did nothing wrong. This was a time of transition, this somehow happened, and we would love to take the penalty for it.”

City Manager Jonathan Young informed the council that the city had received no applications for the sale of fireworks by the deadline and—according to the city’s municipal code — there was no allowance for exceptions.

“This is the boundary set by our city code and there is no exemption process, there is not a penalty process, there’s not a ‘City Manager can waive it’ process, it’s a fixed timeline, and so, there are […] a number of legal concerns that would come to fruition if we were to simply say, ‘eh, it’s in our code, but I think we should just, you know, ignore what’s in the code, that’s not good governance,” Young said.

Angle Lake Park will be Closed Evening of July 4th

Additionally, Young reiterated unique safety concerns the city is facing for its Fourth of July celebration this year due to the increased need for law and fire enforcement being reallocated towards safety measures for the incoming FIFA games over the next two years. The size of the crowds at Angle Lake Park on the Fourth of July also surpassed the area’s ability to safely contain them, adding further concerns. As a result, the city has made the decision to close Angle Lake Park on the evening of July 4th for 2025 and 2026 to protect the safety of the community.

“I completely understand good governance. We should be following our codes. Otherwise, why are we making codes in the first place?” said Councilmember Peter Kwon. “I do not believe the city council was aware of the possibility that […] there were no applications by the deadline and so of the possibility that there would be no firework sales in the City of SeaTac,” Kwon continued. “If we were made aware of that by the May 1st deadline, I think we would have agreed to take action immediately to try to remedy that.”

Councilmember Kwon also emphasized that the timing of the missed deadlines was particularly bad because closing Angle Lake Park on July 4th will greatly impact the community.

“We’re closing down Angle Lake Park this year,” Kwon stressed. “Which is a big deal to the community.”

By working quickly in collaboration with city staff during the meeting, a motion to suspend the rules was passed in order to add an item to the agenda that allowed for a motion to be put on the table for the council to direct city staff to grant a one-time exemption to the firework application deadline.

The motion was originally brought forth by Councilmember Vinson. An amended version of his motion passed and reads as follows:

“I move the city council to direct city staff to prepare and bring forward on an expedited basis a proposed amendment to SeaTac Municipal Code 5.35.030 to allow for a one-time exception in 2025 to accept firework stand permit applications submitted after the standard May 1st deadline.”

The motion passed unanimously, allowing for the application process to move forward.