San Juan County Futures Information Resource

Welcome!

Our intention is to provide you with information on different options regarding the future impacts of growth for San Juan County, Washington. Since 1970, San Juan County has been the fastest growing county in Washington State. This growth has occured largely because the county is small, beautiful, and unusual. Many describe it as paradise.

Growth pressures plague Washington State. In response to the negative impacts of growth, the state legislature passed the Growth Management Act in 1990. As a result of the state law, San Juan County (SJC) rewrote its comprehensive plan, completing the process in 1998. A handful of citizens felt that parts of the new plan were in violation of the state law, and made several successful appeals of the plan before the Western Washington Growth Managment Hearings Board. As a consequence of those appeals, San Juan County is in the process of re-designing critical parts of the comprehensive plan (CP).

(Abbreviations and definitions for many terms are presented here)

Land use planning is complicated, confusing and arcane. Comprehensive plans are virtually incomprehensible. Nevertheless, the comp plan names the sport, establishes the playing field and sets the rules regarding future growth permitted in a county. Perhaps the best place to get oriented is to read some of the following essays.

Essays:

An overview to the "density" issue was presented as an op-ed piece in January 1995 and published in the Islands Weekly.

Testimony before the BOCC by Maile Johnson on 4/26/2000 eloquently describes the current challenge and opportunity.

A very brief primer on the population issue at the heart of the challenge to the plan.

Additional essays on growth issues related to San Juan County are available for contemplation.

Read San Juan County Planning Department's commissioned study on related resort communities (aspen, nantucket and martha's vineyard) here. (You can also find this report on the county's web site. After clicking this link, go down the page to the section entitled "staff reports", then click on the line titled "Socioeconomic Impacts Growth Pressure in Seasonal and Resort Communities. Staff Report, 5-25-2000; attached technical report examines conditions in Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and Aspen".)

Legal Efforts

In order to preserve the small scale and rural qualities of the island community so valued by residents, visitors and prospective new residents, 5 citizens initiated appeals of the comprehensive plan in the winter months of 1999. The thrust of their appeals was that they believed the comp plan, or CP, did not meet the standards required of it by the state's Growth Management Act (GMA). The Western Washington Growth Management Hearings Board agreed, and found the CP out of compliance with the Act. In fact, the Western Board imposed an invalidity order on the County, preventing the subdivision of some properties until the County made revisions to the CP.

Information on the appeals, appeal process, findings of the Western Board, etc. during 1999 can be found here.

San Juan County modified the CP to address the problems identified by the Western Board, and resubmitted its amended CP to the Board for its review in the fall of 2000.

Once again, the same group of petitioners felt that the county had still not made revisions that were within the standards of the Act, and so appealed again.

To read about the second round of appeals in the fall of 2000, just click here for filings and orders in 2000.

And again, the Western Board agreed with the petitioners, and imposed another invalidity order on the county. Two actually. One of the invalidity orders prevents a property owner from constructing a guest house. The county's response to this invalidity order has been to appeal it to Thurston County Superior Court. However, the Western Board does not defend its decision in that court, nor does the State of Washington via the Attorney General's Office. The petitioners must present the case against the 'guesthouse' policy before the Thurston County Court.

To present an adequate challenge, the petitioners need some legal muscle. Legal muscle costs money. Hence the request for assistance from the community.

A third round of appeals, (including a continuation of the challenges that were unresolved in the 2nd round of appeals), was held on March 6 and 7, 2001. To read some of the materials filed for this Hearing including the May 7, 2001 order of the Western Board, click here for 2001 materials.

SJC, disamused by rulings against it, continued to obfuscate, deny, oppose, delay and spend hundreds of thousands of your tax dollars in a futile, and ineffective, effort to resist the rulings of the WWGMHB and two Superior Court judges. Planners have come and gone at a rate faster than updates to CNN.

As of June 2006 the county has stayed an appeal of an ADU ruling to the Court of Appeals (initiated by former commissioners, all of whom have been voted out of office), pending the resolution of the "guest house" or detached ADU issue. This issue has more or less been resolved by the Compliance and FDO orders issued in mid February, 2007. Many other issues remain in resolving SJC's comp plan non-compliance. Perhaps the next most contentious issue circles around the definition and creation of compliant "VGA's" (Village Growth Areas, a local version of the GMA "UGA", or Urban Growth Area). The process of coming into compliance in this area is characterized by the same delay and deny tactics that have failed regarding the ADU issue. However, due to energy and time limitations, this topic is not covered in the materials in this web page.

Reading legal documents may not be "your thing", yet the comp plan rubber meets the GMA road on this stretch of the highway. To really know what is going on, you need to be willing to get your foot wet in these waters, or, to follow the rubber/road metaphor, to smell the smoke and see the length of the burn marks on the tarmac. Read a brief or two. We think you will find the experience valuable, and it certainly will give you a flavor of the process that a citizen needs to follow if he/she wishes to wrestle with this dragon.

If you see a reference to an "index number" while reading the material, including the briefs (sometimes indicated as "#" followed by a 6 digit number, such as #231432), this number refers to a legally defined page within a document. The San Juan County Prosecutor's Office has a complete list of all documents for which index numbers have been created, as well as all the indexed documents, any of which you can obtain a copy of.

Another thing to notice, if you walk down the legal trail we've paved for you, is that there are 2 cases (so far) that are still in process: 99-2-0010c and 00-2-0062c. The first case, abbreviated to "10c", refers to the issues that were raised in the 1999 case. The second case, "62c", refers to the new issues raised in response to the amendments to the comp plan, amendments made by SJC in response to the Final Decision and Order (FDO) from the first case.

What You Can Do

With thanks to KCTS television for the idea, we urge you to:

Inform

Learn about the comp plan issues. Learn about the legal challenges. Learn about the arguments. Learn what the concerns are regarding increase in taxes, loss of wildlife and wildlife habitat, concern over depletion of water resources, loss of the values and size of a small rural community (SJC has the greatest gap between the haves and the have nots of any county in the country), increase in conflict that is a likely outcome of the population growth permitted by the CP. Each of you may have a concern. After reading about the issues, and informing yourself, take the next step.

Inspire

Think about what you want. Read the Vision Statement and imagine what it really means in terms of the number of people, where they are located, how fast the county should grow, and what mix of people we want for our community. Be creative and inspire ("to breathe life into") your own interpretation of the foundation of the Comp Plan, the Vision Statement. Then...

Involve

Get involved in ways that work for you. Write a letter to your Commissioner. Talk a friend into writing a letter or sending an email, or even informing him or herself about the issues. Send a contribution, and get a friend to send a contribution, to support the legal efforts to preserve the islands we call special, we call an "extrodinary treasure of natural beauty and abundance." Write a letter to the editor. If you have the means, consider a large contribution, or donating some land to OPAL for affordable housing, or putting a conservation easement on your property. Fund an all county mailing. Be a speaker, or help support a speaker, to promote a long-overdue conversation on how we meet the multiple objectives of our Vision Statement, how we preserve as well as maintain an income stream, how we limit population impacts while allowing growth.

One suggestion for coordinating these different needs into a coherent plan is presented below as the Smart Growth Policy. Read it. Disagree? Great! Write us and say why. Write your own plan. Put it out there by yourself or ask us to publish it on the web. Discussion and Consensus are what we need to come to a personal, practical and participatory decision about how to move forward, consciously and deliberately, as stewards of our own and our children's children's future.

You can contribute financially to the effort to make the Vision Statement a reality. Why would I want to contribute? Here's what fellow islanders have said with their contributions.

Since the only 501(c)3 organization that is focusing on these issues right now in San Juan County is The Friends of the San Juans, please send a contribution of any amount to:

Friends of the San Juans
P.O. Box 1344
Friday Harbor, WA 98250

Contributions are tax deductible.

Smart Growth Policies

The ideas in the SGP are similar to the proposed Comp Plan for Nantucket. Nantucket is an island community similar to San Juan County located off the coast of Massachusetts.

The idea of Smart Growth is percolating up in many places. Minnesota has a Smart Growth process.

Futurewise (formerly 1000 Friends of Washington) has also weighed in on Smart Growth and GMA.

According to the U.S. Census for 2000, San Juan County has been the 2nd fastest growing County in Washington State, for the 10 year period 1990-2000. (For the 30 year period, 1970 to 2000, SJC had been the fastest growing County in Washington.) Now, the fastest growing county is Clark County. In late April, 2001, Clark County Commissioners voted to restrict the growth rate of the county to 1.5%, far below that which they had been growing. When you read about this unexpectedly courageous political decision, imagine that your letter (see below) to the SJC BOCC might be the straw that brings about the same kind of forward thinking. (Note, as of June 2006 the newspaper account of this action has been removed from the web site where it was originally reported: href="http://www.columbian.com/04242001/front_pa/191278.html)

Take the Straw Poll

Take a straw poll on one of the issues and let the County Council know how you feel.

Send a Letter to the County Council

Write a letter or email, sign it and let the Council know how you feel.

Resources

Disclaimer:

This web site was created by one petitioner to provide full public information about the comp plan and issues raised in the appeals. It is not provided by San Juan County.

Petitioners are committed to supporting conservation of the biologic, scenic and rural qualities of the San Juan Islands. We encourage the support of The San Juan Preservation Trust, a non-profit land trust helping preserve San Juan County by assisting landowners in dedicating conservation easements on their property.

If you would like to contribute to the discussion on and of the future of San Juan County, or have suggestions for improving this web site, please email your submissions or ideas to "joe@doebay.net"

© 2006 joe symons








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