The Clark County Council continues to wrangle with updating the county’s 20-year growth plan. On Wednesday, the council decided not to move forward with a resource lands study, citing concerns about whether the study could be thoroughly completed in just two months.
County Manager Kathleen Otto said using the study to approve zoning changes in the growth plan could lead to problems later.
“It can be appealed and lead to litigation,” Otto told the council.
Otto said the county has also received 180 site-specific requests, which are typically zoning-change requests submitted by property owners, during the update period. Last month, the council directed staff to again review the requests for the update.
“Typically, we see less than 10,” Otto said. “Doing this intensive work in a short amount of time does give me pause in opening us up to be challenged.”
Without the resource study, which was budgeted at $300,000, the county won’t be able to consider some land-use requests from the cities and the county itself. Many of the requests are needed to approve urban growth boundary expansions.
The cities have to submit land-use alternatives — proposed zoning changes, urban growth boundary changes, changes to mineral, agricultural or forest lands, etc. — which are then included in the county’s environmental study.
Camas, Ridgefield and La Center submitted alternatives that would require removing agricultural, forest or mineral land designations to make acreage available for residential, commercial or industrial use. State law requires a resource study be completed to include these changes.
“Historically, this study has taken a couple of years. It’s a very intensive study. It’s countywide, and we’re looking at doing this in a few months,” Otto said.
Councilor Michelle Belkot said she didn’t want to move forward with the study and instead complete the growth plan without it. She said the county is already facing a budget shortfall.
Councilor Wil Fuentes said concerns about not having the time to conduct a thorough study had been raised previously but said it still made sense to move forward for the next update.
“I think there’s a lot of value in the resource lands study, but not now. We don’t have the time. We don’t have the resources. We have a lot of work and I think if we wait until 2026, I believe that’s the best option,” Fuentes said during the meeting.
Councilor Matt Little said he also wanted to look at transfer development rights — a tool for managing urban sprawl by concentrating development — but Otto said state law limits a resource study to resource lands only. Transfer development rights, or TDRs, allow developers to purchase development rights in a specific area and transfer them to another area to increase housing density. Otto said the council could look into TDRs but that would require a separate study.
“We have to accommodate growth, the population and employment, jobs, lands. We need to focus that growth in the cities,” Council Chair Sue Marshall said. “Where it’s needed to bump out this way or that way to accommodate that population growth and the jobs, and let’s consider the cost of infrastructure as well.”
Marshall said she very much agreed a resource lands study is needed but also wanted to see it include natural resource and open space lands.
“We’re not able to do that right now, but we do need to figure out accommodating the population and lands for jobs and to do that within the time frame that we have. I would be in favor of putting off that study for some time in the future,” she said.
Marshall also said the cities are still working on their preferred land-use alternatives and could make needed changes, before submitting them to the county for review by the council.
