POULSBO — The clock continued ticking on the city’s efforts to adopt a new Critical Areas Ordinance Wednesday night as a public hearing on the long-awaited decision was postponed until the March 7 city council meeting.
After listening to two presentations from the city’s CAO working group, which spent six weeks developing recommended changes to the draft ordinance, a counter viewpoint from local developer Byron Davis and a compromise ordinance from Councilman Dale Rudolph, the council unanimously voted to extend the public hearing on the environmental regulations.
“I don’t see getting this done within four to five weeks,” Planning Director Barry Berezowsky said. “Five weeks is the outside.”
Berezowsky said this should provide sufficient time for state agencies and the tribes to review the proposed ordinance. It will also allow the city’s planning staff to craft the final draft with those comments and revisions from the council.
As the council’s liaison to the CAO working group, Rudolph said the proposed ordinance is far as the city can get without delaying its adoption for several more months.
“We are the bad boy of CAO right now, because we haven’t done what we were supposed to do 14 months ago,” Rudolph said.
Being a “bad boy” isn’t without its problems, though, and the city has already lost out on potential state grant funding because it hasn’t adopted its new CAO as required by the state’s Growth Management Act.
“I recommend at some point we have to make a decision or we’re going to hold up all projects in the city affected by critical areas indefinitely,” Rudolph said.
Councilman Mike Regis said he understands the desire to expedite the adoption of the new CAO, but offered a caveat.
“I can’t approve a document that’s going to be trumped on and will delay it any way,” Regis said.
In addition to the state environmental mandates, the federal government’s Non-point Pollution Discharge Elimination System Phase II is scheduled to be implemented in the near future, he said. NPDES regulations focus on water quality issues.
“We don’t know how that is going to affect our ordinance,” Regis said. “Personally, I am not going to adopt a CAO for the sake of removing a moratorium.”
But when Councilman Jeff McGinty asked Berezowsky how often the CAO could be amended, Berezowsky replied that it could be altered as often as the council chooses to do so.
“So we could adopt it as it is, and then come back and make changes until all the issues are resolved?” McGinty asked.
Berezowsky responded that is an option for the council to consider.
Two reports,
differing strategies
Becky Erickson, who chaired the CAO working group, presented four recommendations to the council and admitted there were some issues on which the group simply couldn’t agree.
“One of the biggest issues was stream buffers. The group could not come to a consensus,” Erickson told the council.
The majority of the 14-member group favored buffers between 100 and 150 feet, but a two-person minority held out for 300 foot buffers, she said.
One thing the group did concur on was that the city needs improved maps showing exactly where streams, wetlands and other critical areas are, so the planning department can have a better idea of exact locations, Erickson said.
The group’s second recommendation was that the city contract for an additional best available science analysis of the entire city and clearly define when the vesting or grandfathering of buffers occurs within the context of the CAO.
“If it’s grandfathered, how long does that last and how does that occur?” Erickson asked.
Part of that recommendation was to allow Dr. Chris May, who teaches a class on stream biology at Western Washington University, to use the city’s streams for educational purposes.
On the issue of stream buffers, Erickson said the majority of the CAO group supported the scenario centered around different buffers for developed and undeveloped environments with science from the state and the city’s consultant to support both ideas.
But in her report to the council, Erickson didn’t mention the sliding scale buffer system, which drew the ire of Linda Berry-Maraist, who also served on the group.
“You have an opportunity not just to keep things the way they are, but to make them better,” Berry-Maraist said.
One way to to do this, she said, is for the city to provide incentives for property owners to improve their stream buffers. Since many stream buffers are patchwork and vary in quality from location to location, the quantity isn’t as important as the quality, Berry-Maraist said.
“A number of jurisdictions have adopted sliding scales for buffers and there is best available science to support that,” she said.
For Rudolph, who reviewed the report, Berry-Maraist’s explanations weren’t quite enough.
“I feel that you say there is plenty of best available science available, but you’re not a scientist,” Rudolph said. “I believe this is misstatement.”
Even so, the “one size fits all” buffer approach doesn’t provide incentives for property owners to improve their properties, Berry-Maraist said.
“I don’t disagree with you at all,” Rudolph said. “Right now it isn’t backed up by science.”
