The Gristle

Odds and ends

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

ODDS AND ENDS: A packed house attended a description of Washington’s long and distinguished history with the Growth Management Act at Bellingham City Club last week. Kaleen Cottingham, director of the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office, who worked on the original GMA legislation, presented an overview of that 20-year history to listeners at the monthly meeting of the nonpartisan civic organization. She was followed by panelists that included Ferndale Mayor Gary Jensen and former Whatcom County Planning Commissioner Jean Melious, who ran for County Council in 2010. Panelists took over from Cottingham, and sketched the rough-and-tumble, wasteful resistance to state law that has consumed Whatcom County government for two decades.

Notably absent from the gathering of civic leaders and elected officials was, unfortunately, the architects of that waste, Whatcom County Council. None showed up for an illuminating, factual discussion of strongly bipartisan legislation designed to prevent communities from bankrupting themselves with unplanned sprawl.

Bellingham City Council at least had an excuse for absence, with several members in Olympia attending a conference sponsored by the Association of Washington Cities. There, council learned about a number of public policy issues, including advice on how best to navigate the state’s Public Records Act in an age of social media. These are useful tools that require special care for transparency.

Conference advice might have assisted Whatcom County Council last week as they crafted new rules on how to handle e-mail correspondence among and between council members and the public. The county was faulted by the Washington State Auditor in November for the council’s lack of clarity in policy. Email exchanges between council members can create an unintended quorum by “serial communication” and violates the Open Public Meetings Act, the auditor warned.

Council bogged down in a discussion of how to handle blind copies, an option that can conceal the names of recipients on a distribution list. Under state records laws, such data and metadata must be available to a public disclosure request. Responsive, council’s original draft prohibited blind copying. Council member Barbara Brenner balked at that language, citing privacy issues, and said that if that language was approved she was not going to comply with it. A council majority softened the language to “highly discourage” blind copying, a change Council member Pete Kremen observed rendered the soft policy no policy at all.

While County Council is to be praised for clarifying these rules, Brenner’s recalcitrance, her frank admission that whatever was drafted into law she would ignore, circles back and helps illuminate council’s 20-year dodge of the goals and policies of GMA.

County Council last week received yet another rebuke from the Washington Growth Management Hearings Board, the latest in a series of smackdowns.

In 2010, council passed an ordinance that granted six months of automatic extensions to permit applications. The measure was similar to those offered by the City of Bellingham and other communities, recognizing construction had stalled as banks tottered and financing dried up. The county went even further, however, and allowed permits that had long expired, some decades old, to resurrect under old rules governing development and environmental mitigation.

The hearings board ruled in August the county’s extension of permits was not in compliance with state law because it allowed hundreds of potentially harmful projects to move forward without controls to assess those potential impacts.

“While the ordinance states on its face it is in effect for six months, it also purports to allow permit extension requests to be filed for up to two years,” the board observed dryly. “The board questions how an ordinance that has expired can possibly continue to authorize such applications following its expiration date.”

Council responded by repealing their dumb ordinance by resolution, despite being told—again and again by planners and legal experts—that resolutions are not binding and carry no force of law. Council ignored the protest.

The GMBH last week agreed with the protest, finding “the county adopted a non-binding resolution to cure the ordinance’s failings. A resolution does not bring the county into compliance with the GMA nor the board’s [earlier] order because, by the county’s own Charter, a resolution has no force of law.” The board scratched their collective heads over why county policymakers and legal staff believed a resolution was the correct response when it was, on the face it, an absurd response.

In remarks at City Club, attorney Jean Melious performed a back-of-the-envelope estimation of how much money the county has wasted in inadequate and futile fighting of the state’s growth laws. She put the number, conservatively, at a quarter of a million dollars over the past two years. Yet county policymakers have been fussing and squawking about GMA for 10 times that length of time, long after other neighboring counties with similar concerns have come into compliance with state goals.

Still the council fusses, scoffing at and dismissing the authority of the state board and the courts that have—unequivocally—supported that authority. In July, the Washington Supreme Court reasserted that the state “courts give ‘substantial weight’  to a board’s interpretation of the GMA.” Still council persists, at a total cost of taxpayers on the order of millions of dollars in reverses and lost opportunity costs.

Last week, County Council member Bill Knutzen suggested to the Bellingham Herald that the council might consider complying with state law rather than continuing to fight it.

“We’ve won some, and we’ve lost some,” he shrugged.

Really? In fact, in its most recent dustup, the county lost in every substantive way on more than 20 aspects of their rural land use plan the hearings board found “clearly erroneous.”

Being caught in a series of 20 bungled burglaries, a scofflaw might expect jail. Alas, that fate does not await a council that has picked taxpayer pockets out of millions.

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