Time for a Change on a Systemic Level

Dave Pros is a Lake Samish resident, former realtor and served eight years on the Whactom County Planning Commission, two years as chairman.

It has taken me several of my eight years on the Whatcom County Planning Commission to start to understand why we are where we are, concerning growth. Meeting after meeting, I would leave wondering how the action we just took fits into the big picture of what we want for our future. While disturbing, the reality is there is no big picture!

Unbelievable but true! How can this be?

Not having a big picture that guides our day-to-day decisions serves a small segment of our population very well. Without a big picture to guide us, many of our government’s land-use decisions rest on the verbal ability of the hired mercenary lawyers — not on what is good for the county or marginalized citizen input.

As a community, we’re already dissatisfied with our growth rate and on the verge of the most massive up zoning in the history of our county. The victim is the Urban Growth Area (UGA) around Bellingham. How happy will unaware Hamsters and county-folk be when the bulldozers arrive?

The development community controls where and how fast Whatcom County grows. Nothing against them, they view the world a certain way and they take action to make their vision happen; we could all take a few lessons. The system is 180 degrees out of whack and the good news is we can fix it.

Before we get to the basics that created this dilemma, let me ask a couple of questions (if you doubt the development community is in control):

n Who controls how many “living units” a developer builds at one time? They do! The amount is unlimited!

n Who controls how fast can they build? They do! As fast as they want!

n Can a developer build anywhere he/she wants even if the project does not fit the community’s goals and the neighborhood doesn’t want it? Yes! (any residential zoned area)

n Can the units be built even if it means roads and other infrastructure will fall below county and state required standards? Yes, no problem!

n Does the developer pay for fixing the problems (impacts) she/he creates? No taxpayers do!

Since “control” is defined as “to exercise restraint or direction over; dominate; command” and developers can build as much as they want, anywhere they want, at any speed they want, even against the community’s wishes, and we taxpayers are obligated to protect their profit by paying to fix their impacts, to me, that is control. Something is out of whack! Why have we, as tax paying citizens, allowed this to happen?

To really understand why the system is the way it is, let’s go to the basic level of what guides our decisions: philosophy. The development community has sold many leaders on the “unlimited growth is good” (UGG) philosophy.

It’s easy to understand; most people believe growth, as a concept, is good. We personally want to grow in all positive areas of our lives; we want our kids to grow, we want our bank accounts to grow. But there are areas we do not want to grow, our bellies, our butts, tumors, cholesterol count, our taxes, our loss of sense of place and anything that will affect our peaceful, close to nature lifestyle. Growth is good in some areas not in others.

Local government is also controlled by an “unlimited growth is good” philosophy.

Years ago the UGG philosophy was needed; our population had grown very little from the 1920s to the early 1970s. When I moved here, the economy had stagnated, change was desired. Growth is good for awhile; then it is not. Is our UGG philosophy right for today?

The UGG philosophy serves a handful of people extremely well, and they control the future of our county. Follow the money and we see who supports the UGG philosophy. Money is a great motivator, it gets some of our finest minds spending time to find every loophole and create every kind of persuasive argument, real or fantasy, to keep the money flowing in their direction. Often lawyers speak to the Planning Commission and County Council as if their opinion is actually the word of God, when of course it is just their personal guess made for the benefit of their billing hours.

Bottom line, until we are willing to put growth into the category of the things that are controlled by the community majority, rather than controlled by the few for their self interest, we are doomed to loosing many, if not all, the qualities we love about our homeland.

Every seven years the Growth Management Act requires counties to pick a 20-year population projection number within a range given to them by the state. UGG thinking says, go high or at least pick a number based on historic growth, which has been at at an all-time high. The pressure from the development community is extremely strong. In 2002 the county picked a number of about 62,000. They could have picked a lower amount but because of our UGG philosophy, they did not.

The county then consults with the cities and allots a percentage of that number to each. Because the development community lobbied to take the highest number it could, Bellingham chose to accommodate over 32,000, more than the county total. Whatever number is chosen, a number of things must be done including rezoning to maintain a 20-year supply of buildable land to accommodate the number of people picked.

In cities, accommodation is done in the Urban Growth Areas that surround each city. Cities must continuously rezone land to maintain a 20-year supply of buildable land, in a never-ending manner. This is why some people refer to the GMA as the Growth Mandate Act. And this is why, contrary to what many people think, zoning does not protect areas.

If we realized how negatively this number would effect our quality of life and taxes, and how these projections force the government to act against what the vast majority of the people of the county wanted, our local government might have picked a number that was more citizen friendly.

We could have avoided the pending destruction that is going to occur because the zoning proposed by the city is the most massive up zone in history of Whatcom County. The next time you go up three or more stories up in a downtown Bellingham building, notice how the trees surround the city and make it feel like a “town.” The city-desired high density of 12-24 units per acre will change all that. Densities of eight or more units per acre usually mean apartment-like buildings, so imagine the treed area replaced by buildings surrounded by parking lots.

UGG affects us in other ways — we have standards for services the county government is to provide for its citizens. These standards are called Levels of Service (LOS). Examples are: streets being sized based on the number of vehicles using them, maintaining one policeman 1,000 county residents, a certain amount of park land per 1,000 county residents, etc.

Even though thousands of citizens have been consulted to determine what LOS levels will maintain our quality of life, their opinions don’t matter. Do we stop building to maintain those LOS levels? UGG says no, keep issuing those building permits. How about the fire protection and jail space? Certainly no one want to see us grow faster than we can protect ourselves! Sorry, no again, keep issuing those building permits. How about neighborhoods begging to retain their character, or saving the rural qualities of our county? No, rezoning and/or expansion must continuously occur to accommodate the projection number picked.

Remember, the GMA requires us to maintain a 20-year supply of buildable land. As fast as builders can use it up, the county and city governments must rezone to maintain that supply.

Don’t we have a Comprehensive Plan to fix this problem? Yes, we have a Comprehensive Plan based on a massive survey, “The Visioning Process,” conducted mainly in 1991-92. It gives us some very generalized guidelines, but our County Council has declared those findings “out of date.” So why not do another one? A long-term 100-year “legacy plan.” This would guide the County Council members so they could carry out the will of the people.

My guess is, more people than ever want to protect as much of the good, unique qualities of our county as possible, but that does not serve the self-interest of people in the development community. Without this guide, confusion reigns, contradictions abound and lawyers speak much louder than citizens. Without a guide, everything is up for grabs, guess which group almost always wins?

How about quality growth (QG) as a guideline instead of UGG? Quality growth means we use “quality of life” as our basis for planning. Quality of life-based planning is land-use planning, in which the primary goal is to develop strategies that ensure population growth maintains or enhances the quality of life as needed and desired by the tax-paying citizens of our county.

Essential ingredients are:

•a long-range voter validated land-use plan, a “legacy plan” that serves as a guide, and gives a context to our daily decisions so all future land-use decisions are made with the same goal in mind.

•a belief that our highest allegiance is owed to our current citizens and their goals concerning where, and how fast we grow (as long as we comply with GMA mandates). Our current Whatcom County Wide Planning Policy #4 says, “consideration of citizen comments shall be evident in decision-making process.” This is a good way to explain QG. Citizens have already put QG in the Comprehensive Plan. (Why this is ignored is for another column.)

•mechanisms to implement citizen input.

Here is an example: if “we the people” in our long-range plan decide we are happy to have a county of 350,000 people in 2062 (an additional 180,000, more than twice our current size of 170,000), this means we would need to plan for 36,000 people every 10 years for 50 years or 3,600 each year. It means we are not okay with 5,000 or 6,000 people each year, only 3,600. The principles of QG would have us allow all of the 3,600 new housing units yearly, but not more.

Of course, I, and many of us, do not want to more than double our population in 50 years, but it’s up to the residents of our whole county to decide, not just the development community like it is now.

The few benefits of changing to a quality growth philosophy are:

•we the citizens (through our elected leaders) now control our future,

• we no longer have to endure population increasing faster than we can build infrastructure,

• we will be able to get LOS levels we are willing to pay for, not what is forced on us by out of control development,

• we can safely support our lucrative tourism industry because we won’t have to worry about accommodating all the visitors who want to move here.

We get economic benefit, protected critical areas, future important areas protected, many more worthwhile benefits, just by changing philosophy.

How about not having to constantly fight to maintain the character of our neighborhoods? Or not having to jam growth down the throats of people in the UGAs by rezoning their areas to 10, 12 or 24 units per acre (the city’s proposal). We can also stop sprawl from destroying the rural nature of our county.

Now, our future happens by chance because the controlling development community has no long-range design. Wherever, whenever and how rapidly a builder decides to develop, is how we grow.

By the way, “master planned development” is the newest beloved concept by city and county planners. Master planned developments are those ticky-tacky very dense developments one sees when driving or flying over most of Southern California.

With QG we could direct growth to the downtown cores of our small cities, revitalizing the economies of some places that would like to see a bit of growth. Planners propose the untried, unproven “urban village” concept (created from scratch) when we already have whole towns with boarded up buildings.

Developers say “the market decides how fast we grow,” then they hire people to market Bellingham to the world. If their houses built for speculation don’t sell fast enough, the developers’ battle cry is: “Get more people up here, offer big screen TVs (like D.R. Horton, Inc., the largest homebuilder in the United States) to get them to buy, offer free upgrades (like all builders), find some way to entice people to move here to get these units sold, or we will hire someone else.” It is strange how there isn’t enough profit for builders to cover some of the costs for affordable housing needs, but there’s always plenty of money to market their Bellingham projects to the world, and offer incentives. The system is so convoluted that many in the development community support socialized growth by expecting taxpayers to subsidize their projects and are ticked off if taxpayers wonder why.

By being in control of our growth, the whole situation changes. Quality growth brings new positive answers to our growth problems.

What if we had a policy of issuing one permit per person, unless ... long plats included affordable housing? What if our policy is one permit per person unless ... all infrastructure was in place before the units could be occupied? What? No more lanes blocked off for construction after there are thousands more cars on the road?

QG does not stop growth, but it puts the community in charge. Instead of begging developers to improve the intersection if their project puts huge amounts of new people/vehicles in certain areas, causing an intersection to fall below acceptable standards, wouldn’t life be better if they came to the table offering to improve the situation in order to obtain more than one permit per person?

By having a QG philosophy, we could also deal with the “vesting” problems. Vesting means the environmental rules in place the day the lot was created (short plats) are locked in forever. The rules do not change no matter what science discovers. But if our policy is one permit per person, and our policy is to only issue a few permits per quarter for lots that have vested critical area problems, some people may want to abide by current best available science guidelines to qualify in a category where more permits are available each issuing period.

Unafraid of increased growth, we could expand tourism which:

•means more money in Whatcom residents’ pockets and not have the higher tax bill to rebuild infrastructure,

•funds the county budget to the tune of the taxes on $396 million, providing close to if not more money than agriculture,

•provides additional protection of critical areas and qualities we love about Whatcom County,

•gives us the incentive to protect valuable areas like the Chuckanut Mountains, Galbrath Mountain and other unique places in our county that would otherwise be gone forever to UGG development.

If you have any suggestions about how we can get to a quality growth philosophy, or would like to attend a QG get-together committee, please e-mail me at: PROS-P-W@juno.com. §