No Loss for Words

County Council members are probably feeling pretty smug today after shutting down the requests for expansion of urban growth areas.  They are probably thinking that they really showed those guys who were trying to compete with the county.  Everyone better know that Snohomish County is not going to let anyone else do their job of screwing up “rural urban transition” land.

It may be that the proposal by the city of Snohomish did not contain all the information they should have provided to justify an increase in their boundary.  The criteria for expanding UGBs may be so technical that city planners are not bright enough to figure them out.  The guidelines should be clear enough that political consideration is not the key component of a decision.  Snohomish and the property owners will go back to the drawing board and do a more thorough job next time and it will be hard for the county to deny that after removing critical areas and buffers, there is not enough land left to meet employment and population growth targets within the existing boundary. 

As long as there are sewer districts in the county to extend service into areas outside cities, Snohomish County doesn’t need to grant adjustments to UGAs.  They usually come after the land has already been planned and developed under “County Guidance”.  After the fact, the residents of these areas demand other urban services and Snohomish County just shrugs because they don’t offer urban services.  Those would be “city” services.  “Go find a city to take you on.”

 The Lake Stevens Sewer District has been the tool used by the county to undermine the interests of the City of Lake Stevens.  The county has been wildly granting plat approval to areas on all sides of the lake and on Cavalero’s hill for many years because they had a sewer provider that was not accountable to anyone else.  If the county had worked with the city fifteen years ago when the UGB was first drawn, both parties could have talked about how the City of Lake Stevens would look in the year 2010.  Instead, Snohomish County unilaterally made decisions that will profoundly impact that city forever.  Not for the better.

It is not just in Lake Stevens though.  Look at Seattle Hill.  Snohomish County planning is responsible for every bit of that mess.  Their facilitator in that neighborhood is the Silver Lake Sewer District.

Just think about it, if Snohomish County was not in the business of approving urban density housing developments, we would not be experiencing the sprawl everyone is complaining about.  If the only way a parcel of land could be developed at less than “5 acre minimum lot size” was to be in a city, the county would look a whole lot different.

And think about this, every place in Snohomish County where there is an Urban Planning anomaly, Snohomish County government is at the root.

It is interesting watching the Herald letters that deal with the Snohomish proposal to increase their Urban Growth Area north of US Highway 2 along State Route 9.  The Lake Stevens advocates are concerned that their city which is four miles to the north at its closest point lacks developable land for commercial tax base.  It appears that Lake Stevens believes their salvation is in Snohomish.  That troubles me.

In the early years that the county was working on comprehensive plans for the SR 9 corridor after the inception of the Growth Management Act in the early nineties, the city of Lake Stevens was a non-player.  Today, Lake Stevens still grumbles about the loss of land west of Highway 9 to Marysville and I don’t disagree with them about the logic of that decision, but it was the city of Lake Stevens that dropped the ball by not adequately articulating their plan for the future of that land and making a case for being able to deliver anything more than hand wringing.

In spite of my belief that Lake Stevens was at fault for that particular faux pas, Snohomish County Planning seems to be the culprit.  If Arlington, Marysville, Lake Stevens and Snohomish had been brought to the table in 1992 to discuss the long term future for the SR 9 corridor, some of the animosity between Arlington and Marysville, Marysville and Lake Stevens and now Lake Stevens and Snohomish would have been avoided.  The cities, with the county, could have done regional planning so that Snohomish County Planning would not have had their way without regard for the needs of the cities that would eventually annex the land into their boundaries.  Instead, Snohomish County divided the cities to better dictate to them how things would be.

I have sympathy for Lake Stevens’ assessment of their Commercial buildable land inventory within their existing urban growth area.  At the same time, I see a UGA that is huge.  I don’t remember if the City of Lake Stevens ever lobbied the county to halt development within their UGA until they could examine whether the county’s plan met the needs of the city into the future.  Or if they proposed a different vision for the area that might have caused the county to rethink employment issues or growth potential for commercial sales tax revenue that appear to be so important now.

Today, we are closing the barn door after the horse has escaped once again.  That seems to be a pattern with Snohomish County Planning.  They screw up an area, then some city gets to figure out how to mitigate the screw-up.  I cannot think of one area in the county that has not experienced it time and again.

In spite of the fact that property owners in the area along SR 9 north of US 2 have indicated a preference to be a part of Snohomish, sewer district and city officials from Lake Stevens suggest it should be a part of their Urban Growth Area.  They maintain that without the commercial potential that exists in the intersection of the two highways, their city cannot survive.

There will be (negotiations) between the parties on this dispute, but when Lake Stevens says they can’t make it without this land in their city, I am not sure how much room there is for (negotiations).

Today, I am having a hard time deciding who to be angry with.  Lake Stevens is reacting to circumstances where they are not totally in control.  They may be playing defense to give themselves time to better assess their options.  I think that I really want to be mad at Snohomish County.  They are the ones that have screwed things up again.