Eight-ball engineering

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

EIGHT-BALL ENGINEERING: Whatcom County prepares to throw wide the doors for development around Lake Whatcom while simultaneously crippling the revenues that might fund even meager efforts to protect your drinking water resource.

Surprising no one, for the second time in as many weeks Whatcom County Council failed to make the ban on new subdivisions in the Lake Whatcom watershed permanent, a move that would prevent the construction of hundreds of additional homes in this drinking water resource for 91,000 people. The clock runs out on the ban in August.

As we’ve detailed, should that happen, landowners may stampede the county planning office, filing dozens of applications to subdivide their property into additional home sites. As we also detailed, no additional legal clarity will arrive by August on the rules by which these homes might be built.

Do land use rules in place when these properties were first purchased apply; or do the more stringent modern rules in place when development applications are filed apply? The latter would better safeguard human health; the former greatly assists property speculation and profiteering. Guess which concern—ignoring a century of court rulings declaring the contrary—the mighty new County Council majority favors?

“Whatcom County seems to be the the only county in the state of Washington having this conversation in 2010,” county Planning Supervisor Tyler Schroeder observed—particularly about lands bordering a municipal water supply!

Nevertheless, Schroeder said, based on an unchallenged Hearings Examiner ruling, the county will approach these decisions on a case-by-case basis—the very opposite of predictability and transparency: Land use “decisions” with all the planning authority of a Magic 8 Ball: “It is decidedly so.” “Ask again later.” “Signs point to yes.” The county planning director also got the blackball treatment. For David Stalheim, it was swallow this poison pill or be fired. He quit.

Schroeder attempted to explain this lack of coordinated planning policy to—ironically—stunned members of the Lake Whatcom Policy Group.

The policy group was formed in 2008 to continue advance the work of the earlier Interjurisdictional Coordinating Team at the end of the ICT’s five-year work plan for Lake Whatcom. Like its predecessor the ICT, the policy group reviews data about the quality of this drinking water resource and tracks the implementation of the Lake Whatcom management plan. Representatives from city and county governments and the Lake Whatcom Water and Sewer District (LWWSD) are members of the working group.

The group, in the midst this week of updating a new work plan for the lake, has its own behind-the-eight-ball familiarity with lack of direction: Bellingham City Council member Stan Snapp, a member of the group, took the opportunity at their meeting to castigate their lack of progress in the 18 years he’s served to study Lake Whatcom.

“I disagree absolutely that that this work plan is a restoration plan,” Snapp raged. The work plan documents efforts to monitor, measure and record the decline of the lake, but contains few specifics on how to reduce residential and residential impacts. The city has acquired, at great expense and while delaying other activities, public lands to slow the entry of phosphorous into the lake. Other things, like roadbuilding restrictions, are entirely missing, he noted. Along with the rigorous science.

“I and others have been lobbying for a very long time for a restoration plan for Lake Whatcom that follows the EPA Handbook written for this very topic. It’s a cookbook on how to do this,” Snapp said.

But while the policy group stirs the recipe, they may not be able to afford new ingredients. Under the lake management plan now under consideration, about $27.3 million would be spent over the next five years for stream restoration and retrofitting private property to prevent stormwater runoff from entering the lake. It’s a fraction of what is needed to reverse the effects of urbanization. Even the city’s land acquisitions program itself is not entirely up to the task, policy group members learned.

Meanwhile, Whatcom County is busy closing and locking the kitchen.

One set of doors was locked last month, when council passed a law that requires future tax increases to first be approved by a (non-binding) vote of the public. They also foreclosed on the county’s flood tax by adopting a similar restriction for the council’s role as the Flood District Board of Supervisors. That board raised the flood tax in 2008 by approximately $9 per year on a $300,000 home as a means of dodging an executive veto of a more general-purpose tax. The increase brought in nearly $1 million to fund water quality projects, many directed at Lake Whatcom.

Now council President Sam Crawford and his new majority propose rolling back the flood tax to its level before 2008. Once done, lost flood tax revenues may never again be restored solely by board action.

Crawford says that as an alternative to increased flood tax revenues to protect Whatcom’s shorelines he would prefer to offer a more comprehensive, equitable and transparent general tax increase to voters, with specific information about what services taxpayers will receive from the revenues. Only hitch is, as Crawford works to cripple existing revenues he expresses no intention whatsoever of placing the suggested alternative on a future ballot.

“Regardless of whether the proposal to put a tax increase on the ballot had any merits,” Crawford told the Gristle last month, “it would need work and advocacy that cannot be started in May of a given election cycle. So that ain’t going to happen, at least this time around. I don’t recall seeing any signs of support for this idea among my fellow council members.”

So with the outer door behind closed and locked, the inner door to replacement revenues may be similarly barred. Whatcom’s waterways are about to be cleavered in the foyer.