The Gristle

Lines, bright and dim

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

LINES, BRIGHT AND DIM: Sen. Doug Ericksen introduced some remarkable legislation in Olympia last week. Remarkable, in that the Ferndale lawmaker was the one introducing it.

Ericksen’s three bills attempt to better define one of the central tenets of growth planning in Washington: Realistic growth expectations, placed where populations already exist.

Presenting the bills in committee last week, Ericksen noted that most of the growth that has occurred in Whatcom County over the past decade has happened outside urban growth areas. In previous decades, Bellingham—the county’s population center—received up to 65 percent of county growth. Numbers have flipped in recent years, with Bellingham receiving only 20 percent of the growth and the majority of home construction happening on county greenfields.

Ericksen said his bills were intended to preserve farmland and open space by concentrating home construction where it belongs: In planned urban growth areas (UGAs).

Some general commentary: If Doug Ericksen is factually in support of preserving and enhancing farmland and open space, this column salutes and praises him. We hope he does more.

More specifically, the bills are curious.

The first asserts what seems obvious under current law, that growth in urban growth areas should be urban in nature and built at urban densities. Perhaps a more useful bill would state the conceptual opposite—that rural development needs to remain rural in character and compatible with rural uses. That gets at the essence of Whatcom’s ag land crisis.

A second bill would require counties to plan around a midline projection of population growth, the average of high and low forecasts, or explain their reasons for planning around a different forecast. Most counties, including Whatcom, already do accept the midline forecast. Those that don’t already explain their reasons—Clark County, recognizing its role as a bedroom community for Portland, plans for projected high levels of growth.

The third bill (SB 6192) is most curious, attempting to define “low-density sprawl” as development taking place outside of UGAs that does not conform to the county’s adopted rural element. Again, this is already the case, making the reasoning gratuitous and circular. Whatcom County is out of compliance with state law because the county’s proposed rural element permits too much of a kind of development widely perceived as sprawl.

“’Sprawl,’” Ericksen’s bill contends, “means growth taking place outside of established urban growth areas because city or county comprehensive plan approaches, development regulations, or other factors hinder the ability of the county’s urban growth areas to adequately capture growth that would otherwise be attracted to the urban growth areas of the county.”

Most cities do want and accept urban densities. When they don’t, the reason is usually related to terrain, wetlands, critical areas, or existing plans for open space and transportation corridors.

The provision is a recipe to strip local control from cities and allow counties to force developments into these communities despite planning controls. Small wonder Ericksen’s bill received slavering support from representatives of North Bellingham (Caitac) and Yew Street Road developments. These projects were denied by City of Bellingham planners and administrators. Developers lobbied Whatcom County Council, who forced these projects back on to the city. But the county can’t push its stinky plan past the nose of the Washington Growth Management Hearings Board, which continues to gag at its deficiencies. The next move, then, is to change state law to force these projects on Bellingham.

Yet the Adults In The Room in Olympia—including the association that includes the state’s other 38 counties—aren’t readily buying the argument that state law needs to change markedly to accommodate Whatcom’s wacky weirdness and land-flipping criminal enterprise. The county’s mad pissing fit with GMA is uniquely its own, with most neighboring counties in basic compliance with the law and at work addressing more sophisticated concerns.

Let’s take a step back and look at those growth numbers. Home construction went off a cliff in 2007 with the cratering of the housing bubble. Numbers are collapsed everywhere, with new housing starts in Bellingham and Ferndale running 30 percent or more below projections. To use this collapse as a metric to craft statewide policy changes is statistical quackery, like taking the temperature of a cadaver to infer the medical diagnosis of healthy patients.

While it’s certainly true that a lot of growth this decade has been happening outside Whatcom’s cities, such growth is actively permitted and encouraged by the county’s growth plan. As we’ve noted, that plan projects 49,440 additional people living outside Whatcom’s cities at the end of the planning horizon, more people than the county actually expects will move here by 2029. The county has planned and zoned for enough rural capacity to accommodate all of that growth in rural areas. Not a single home needs to be built in urban areas, areas that generally charge impact fees for roads, schools, and public amenities. Small wonder developers are leaping past urban areas and building in the countryside! They are given license and incentives to do so. As any intelligent group would, the hearings board rejects all this as nonsense, inconsistent with state goals.

It is a stretch to argue, as Ericksen does, that structural weaknesses in the state’s Growth Management Act have caused sprawl in the county when the county has never accepted or adopted or been found fully compliant with GMA in its planning policies.

It’s hard to say a law isn’t working when the law has never since its inception been observed or obeyed. Hard to complain about the performance of an engine when the key to the ignition has never been turned.

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