After hearing strong arguments on both sides of a proposal to lift the restriction that allows changes to the County’s Unified Development Code (UDC) and Comprehensive Plan to be enacted just once per year, the San Juan County Council decided it needed to hear more.

The proposal was brought to the Council by the Community Development and Planning Department (CDPD) which said that it had a backlog of more than 100 changes to the UDC and Comprehensive Plan that need to be made. Senior planner Shireene Hale said that dealing with all of the proposals at once is “too big a bite to take,” and, noting the department’s problems with turnover in the past, “There’s the possibility that by the time amendments get through the process, we will have lost the planner who was working on it.”

Hale told the Council that many of the pending changes are required by state law, others are clarifications of troublesome portions of the code and still others involve policy updates.

The proposed change set a two-year time period during which the code could be amended as work on the amendments are completed by the staff and acted upon by the Council for the next two years. In 2011 the once-a-year restriction would go back into effect.

CDPD Director Ron Henrickson said that his department wouldn’t be able to catch up during that period of time, “But given two years – we will see if it works.”

The proposal came to the Council without the endorsement of the County Planning Commission. At its January meeting, the Commission expressed concerns about the ability of citizens to keep track of changes to the code made more often than once a year.

Those same concerns were expressed at Tuesday’s hearing by Chris Clark of San Juan Island and John Evans, representing the San Juan Builders Council. Evans said that he was concerned that without restrictions, the County would make changes “willy-nilly.” He said that builders need predictability to plan projects and, “I don’t see how you can do this without a deadline.”

Nancy Devaux of the Community Home Trust spoke in support of lifting the restrictions, saying the Trust was waiting for some needed code changes, “Affordable housing items are part of the backlog.”

Planner Shireene Hale noted that none of the other eight Puget Sound Counties have similar restrictions on changes to the UDC and Comprehensive Plans and she is unaware of any counties that do. As for how the system has worked here she said, “I don’t know that it ever has really worked.”

This was the Council’s first public discussion of this proposal and, after brief deliberations, it voted to reopen the public hearing at its Sept. 23 meeting to allow more public input.

Stan Matthews, County Communications Program Manager