Bitter brew

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

BITTER BREW: Low taxes. Smaller government that listens to the public. Transparency, honesty and predictability in public affairs.

In the Gristle’s crude understanding, this is what conservatives want. This is what they say they want; and as a manifesto of how we might manage our public affairs, it is a reasonable and responsible one. As the sponsors of the excellent Bellingham Tea Party candidates forum recently cast it, “We support sustainable, predictable government.”

So… why do conservatives support this County Council?

Nothing in the Whatcom County Council’s discussion of urban growth areas last week suggests taxes will be lower; no, taxes will be raised to pay for the increase in government services required for an expanded development base and the conversion of resource land to residential uses. Government will not be smaller; no, it will become bigger and more bureaucratic and cumbersome as it attempts to manage poor land-use decisions. As for transparency, honesty, predictability and listening, council already went through all of this UGA discussion for the past five years.

Over that period, the county has heard from dozens of landowners and special interests, hosted hundreds of hours of planning meetings, received thousands of pages of data and commentary on public attitudes about growth, and spent millions, millions of dollars defending their actions in court and appealing (and losing) decisions that did not go the county’s way. So why are we redoing all this?

County Council sat stonily through hours of additional public commentary last week. Roughly three-quarters of the nearly 60 people who spoke cautioned against the council’s planned adoption of a revised settlement of the county’s urban growth areas, one favorable to developers, one that restores 684 acres to Ferndale, Birch Bay, Nooksack, and Sumas. Speaker after speaker pointed out flaws and errors in their proposed ordinance.

In the end, a council majority appeared ready to wave aside those comments (so much for listening) and move forward to adopt the settlement by simply crossing out or removing inconvenient or inaccurate facts from the original ordinance (so much for transparency and rule of law). Only Barbara Brenner—visibly tired and unsure of the legal problems tied to the adoption of a law with flawed or absent recitals of fact—asked for more time. Ward Nelson, seeing no urgency, provisionally agreed to cast the swing vote to delay their decision until next week.

Jean Melious, chair of the Whatcom County Planning Commission, spoke at the meeting and commented afterward. Melious is a candidate to replace Nelson next fall.

“The Planning Commission has not reviewed, considered or been involved in [this] proposed amendment to the Comprehensive Plan and county zoning map,” she said. Yet state law requires the commission to hold at least one public hearing on such proposed changes. “The draft ordinance,” she pointed out, “addresses this issue by striking out the words ‘Planning Commission.’ In other words, the draft ordinance simply ignores the requirement of Planning Commission review.

“To the best of my knowledge,” Melious continued, ”the council itself directed whoever prepared the ordinance to include specified properties in the revised UGAs. The only input was from attorneys, city officials and consultants for property owners, according to the minutes of the April 12 special ‘committee of the whole’ meeting.”

That meeting, as we’ve related, was held in a remote location, where only development interests were allowed to speak. A straw vote among council members on whether to consider settling with these interests then, within 24 hours, hardened into an ordinance requiring settlement with these interests. Transparency? Honesty? Predictability?

Whatcom County has not “undertaken any additional public participation regarding these amendments,” former Planning Director David Stalheim noted in written comments to council. “Only one public hearing on this matter was scheduled. The County Council has made no concerted effort to engage the public in discussion of these issues such as open houses, workshops or updated information on the county’s web site.”

”The basis of the council’s actions are not clear to me,” Melious said. She is a land-use attorney who teaches planning and environmental policy at Western Washington University. “The Planning Commission has been kept entirely out of the loop. All I can say is that the process that the council has been following is not the process contemplated by the County Code.”

Melious believes “the county’s lack of compliance with state law is extremely costly to taxpayers. The county is ineligible for a number of state grants. Therefore, the longer we are out of compliance with state law, the more money we lose.

“Further,” she said, “the county has not adopted any development impact fees, based on advice [from county staff] that it is ineligible to do so as long as its Comp Plan is illegal. Developers in the unincorporated areas of the county do not pay for roads. They do not contribute to schools. Taxpayers subsidize county developments, making it cheaper to develop in the county than in the city of Bellingham and encouraging sprawl—the opposite of the result that the Comp Plan is intended to achieve.”

This helps explain why developers attempt to hasten some council actions while delaying others—the more delay, the longer taxpayers have to subsidize the costs of sprawl.

“Whether or not it can be calculated in dollars,” Melious said, “I believe that there is a cost to operating outside the rule of law. We are a country of laws, and Whatcom County has been an outlaw for too long. No less an authority than the Washington State Supreme Court has told us that we have violated the law. County Council members take an oath of office to uphold the laws. That is their job. They can work with the Legislature to change the laws that they do not like, but they do not get to pick and choose the laws that they want to implement.”

Conservative voters decided they wanted a change in county government last year: sustainable, predictable, low-cost government. But it seems their tea has gone rancid.