Marysville, WA Animal Ordinances: Veterinary Clinic Zoning (2026)

Marysville Municipal Code § 22A.020.230 defines a veterinary clinic as "a building or premises for the medical or surgical treatment of animals or pets, including dog, cat and veterinary hospitals, including the boarding of hospitalized animals." That sentence sets the scope: a clinic can lawfully board recovering patients on site, not just examine them, and it is defined apart from a "commercial kennel," the code's separate category (also defined in Chapter 22A.020 MMC) for boarding, propagating or training more than four dogs and/or cats.

Where a clinic can locate is set by the permitted-use table at Marysville Municipal Code § 22C.020.060, which lists "Veterinary clinic" as its own row across the city's eleven commercial, mixed-use, industrial, recreation and public/institutional zoning districts (NB, CB, CB-WR, GC, DTC, MU, LI-GC, LI, GI, REC and P/I). Under § 22C.020.050, a "P" marks a permitted use, and "these uses are allowed if they comply with the development standards and other standards of this chapter"; a "C" marks uses "allowed if approved through the conditional use review process"; and a blank cell means "the use is not permitted in that district, except for certain temporary uses." The veterinary clinic row carries a "P" in nine of the eleven columns and no "C" anywhere, so wherever the code allows the use, it is allowed outright with no conditional use permit; two districts show no symbol and bar the use entirely. One of the nine "P" entries is flagged "76," tying that permission to development condition 76 at § 22C.020.070: "Use limited to properties that have property frontage along State Avenue/Smokey Point Boulevard." The residential zones table at MMC § 22C.010 has no veterinary clinic row, so the use has no path into any single-family or multifamily district.

The animal control code treats licensed veterinary practice as a lighter-touch category than kennels. MMC § 10.04.440 requires shelters, kennels, catteries and pet shops to be licensed, but exempts a veterinarian's "possession of animals solely for the purposes of veterinary care" from that licensing. MMC § 10.04.450 exempts any business operating "exclusively as a 'veterinary hospital or clinic'" from the kennel permit and conditional-use-permit process that otherwise applies once a facility exceeds the city's cap on dogs and cats.