A consulting firm hired by Clark County found flaws in planning assumptions Councilor David Madore wrote for the county’s 20-year growth plan, and said half of his assumptions are invalid.
Mercer Island-based R.W. Thorpe and Associates — which email records show Madore reached out to on his own to analyze the planning assumptions he wrote — reported to the board during a Wednesday work session that four of the eight assumptions the councilor wrote for the Comprehensive Growth Management Plan update are invalid. Two are partially invalid and two are valid. The Clark County council approved a $45,000 contract with the land-use firm in December to analyze the assumptions.
At the urging of Community Planning Director Oliver Orjiako, who called the report’s findings significant, Council Chairman Marc Boldt, Councilor Jeanne Stewart and Councilor Julie Olson called for a hearing on Feb. 16 to reconsider the county’s preferred alternative. They also pushed back a hearing previously scheduled for next week to make corrections to Madore’s Alternative 4 to that February meeting.
“I think this report represents … some caution against (Alternative 4),” Orjiako said, adding that moving forward with Alternative 4 given the new information will make it difficult for the county to meet its June 30 deadline for the state Commerce Department to approve the plan.
Alternative 4 would allow for smaller lot sizes in rural areas, potentially leading to significant development in unincorporated Clark County.
The planning assumptions, which dictate policy on what lots are likely to develop, provided the framework for the latest version of Madore’s zoning alternative.
Under previous assumptions, there are 7,073 potentially buildable lots under current zoning rules. Madore’s Alternative 4 could potentially create about 12,401 lots.
Madore argued in his assumptions that thousands of lots shouldn’t be considered buildable at all, identifying only about 3,076 potential buildable lots under current zoning rules and 6,140 under his alternative.
In general, the more lots created by a zoning alternative, the more adverse impacts it could have on the surrounding environment such as water, soil and wildlife.
Despite it twice being rejected by the Planning Commission, Madore and Councilor Tom Mielke voted over Stewart’s objection to approve Madore’s planning assumptions and Alternative 4 as part of its preferred zoning plan in November. The preferred alternative also includes requests from some of Clark County’s small cities to bring land into their urban growth boundaries, as well as some corrections to inconsistencies in Clark County’s maps.
On Wednesday, Madore argued that representatives from R.W. Thorpe and Associates did not “show their work” in their report, which provided examples of county code, state law and other counties’ growth plans to justify their findings.
“I would request that you apply valid logic,” Madore said.
Deputy Prosecutor Christine Cook pointed out that the firm is made up of experts in the field of land planning.
“This is the conclusion that they’ve come up with,” Cook said. “I think it would be very difficult going forward to now say, ‘We don’t like that answer, so we’re going to look for another one.’ ”
Madore also said that just because the consulting firm found challenges in his planning assumptions, that does not automatically make the county’s previous assumptions correct. He echoed previous claims that the county’s assumptions were never vetted for accuracy.
“The assumptions were not adopted,” Madore said. “I think you will recognize that not only were they not adopted, they were not known. We just assumed the numbers were the numbers and the facts were the facts.”
But Cook told Madore that it’s incorrect to say the planning assumptions have not been vetted. The Western Washington Growth Management Hearings Board has found Clark County’s current comprehensive plan, which is built on those assumptions, to comply with state law.
Furthermore, the county council held three work sessions on the planning assumptions in early 2014 and adopted those assumptions in June 2014, Orjiako confirmed after the work session. The board amended the planning assumptions last April to add 15,000 new people to the county’s population.
There remain some significant items on the county’s growth plan to-do list. Seattle-based firm Environmental Science Associates still has to complete the final environmental impact statement on the preferred alternative — a project further delayed by Wednesday’s decision — and the county has to develop the capital facilities plan, which explains what infrastructure the county has to build to accommodate the plan and how it plans to pay for it.
