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Sen. Doug Ericksen wants to preserve farmland by encouraging single-family home construction in urban growth areas. Ericksen sponsored three bills in the Legislature this session that were heard in committee this week.
The ambitious measures attempt to set urban growth boundaries, define low-density sprawl and require counties to use middle-range population projections in the planning process.
“Under land use planning guided by the state Growth Management Act (GMA), people are being forced to go outside of urban growth boundaries to build a single-family home,” Ericksen said. “In many cases, this is not their first choice of where to build and adds to the loss of farmland in Whatcom County.”
The first bill (SB 6190) attempts to provide more certainty to urban zoning and to ensure lands bordering cities will be developed at urban densities and intensities.
A second bill (SB 6192) attempts to define sprawl.
“Low-density sprawl” is defined as development taking place outside of urban growth areas that does not conform to the county’s adopted rural element. The rural element of Whatcom County’s comprehensive plan for growth was recently found by a state growth board to be out of compliance with state goals because it allowed too much low-density development outside of the county’s designated urban growth areas. The county has struggled to bring this plan into compliance for more than two years.
If passed by committee and the legislature as a whole, a third bill (SB 6193) would require counties to use a middle range for making future growth projections. Under GMA, counties are provided a range of growth estimates by the state Office of Financial Management (OFM). The requirement has drawn considerable debate. Some advocates believe that selecting a robust population projection actually encourages explosive growth; others believe that selecting a low population figure causes counties to underplan.
“The middle range projection provided by the Office of Financial Management represents the state’s estimate of the most likely population projection for the county,” Ericksen explained in his bill text. “A county choosing to project future growth by deviating from the middle range must adopt a written explanation justifying the reason for the deviation,” he said.
“People who would like to live in a single-family residence are being forced out into the county” due to the availablity of land supply for that type of construction, Ericksen explained as he introduced his bills to the Senate Government Operations, Tribal Relations and Elections Committee in Olympia.
“What we’ve seen in Whatcom County over the past few years is a larger number of single-family residences built in the unincorporated county than we’ve seen built in Bellingham, our largest city,” the Republican senator from the 42nd District said.
These bills attempt to address that issue, not by prohibiting residential development in rural areas, he said, but by accommodating people who prefer to live in an urban setting by creating certainty in density standards.
Provisions defining sprawl are not in the GMA as currently drafted, Ericksen told committee members.
“This is a first stab at trying to put into the Growth Management Act a definition of what that sprawl would be,” he said. “And in this particular situation, it is when housing that would ordinarily go into that urban growth area is forced outward because there is not adequate room available. This would assist in determining what low-density sprawl would be.”
Ericksen predicted these bills would be useful to communities around the state wrestling with similar growth issues. Mandated at the state level, the measures could limit local planning control with local conditions, critics observed.
“I’m a little nervous about taking what appear to be localized issues in Whatcom County and making statewide policy based upon that,” Josh Weiss said, representing the Washington Sate Association of Counties. Weiss explained that he is in contact with planning staff around the state who have not reported a need for these measures, prompting him to wonder whether they are particular to this area.
Whatcom County Association of Realtors spoke in favor of the bills in Olympia this week. Washington Farm Bureau favored SB 6190.
“The bill almost sounds like it is stating the obvious,” Dan Wood said on behalf of the bureau. “If you create an urban growth area you should expect that there would be urban growth there and a high degree of urban density, but seemingly in some places the obvious concept does not synch and connect very well.”
“Predictability and certainty are at the core of the GMA,” Clayton Petree said. Petree, a candidate for Bellingham Mayor in 2011, spoke in favor of Ericksen’s bills.
“We have unprecedented levels of development in designated agricultural and rural areas of the county,” Petree explained. “Bellingham, the county seat, has reduced its capture of growth from 62 percent from 1995 to 2002 down to about 20 percent in recent years. That was about two-thirds of county growth in the past, now down to only one-fifth.”
Representatives of the public advocacy group Futurewise cautioned that problems Whatcom faces may be less related to cities’ inability or unwillingness to accomodate urban growth than with flaws specific to Whatcom County’s plan for abundant rural development.
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