Time For County To Obey The Law

Whatever Spokane County commissioners decide in the coming weeks, this community will be fighting about growth management for years. As well it should.

What’s at stake is local quality of life, now in jeopardy due to serious traffic bottlenecks, the result of suburban sprawl and the underfunding of road improvements.

What’s at stake is the ability of the local development industry to provide affordable housing in locations with appropriate services including sewers, parks, roads and urban-quality fire and police protection.

What’s at stake is the protection of existing neighborhoods from drive-through traffic and inappropriate commercial intrusions.

What’s at stake is the protection of farm land, air quality and drinking water, all threatened by careless growth.

It is a continuing struggle, not a one-shot deal, to address these concerns.

Under a mandate from the state Growth Management Act, city and county officials have prepared for months to draw preliminary boundaries defining where growth should and shouldn’t go over the next 20 years.

County commissioners plan next month to approve those boundaries and we hope they do. Whatever they decide will be controversial. Whatever they decide will be subject to further refinement.

The county already has missed state law’s deadlines for making these decisions. That is consistent with the longstanding reluctance of county officials to direct growth in ways more likely to protect local quality of life. This reluctance will hurt us all if it obstructs decision making. Instead, growth management’s critics should concentrate on fine-tuning the policies as the battle progresses.

This county’s silent majority, which struggles daily with the adverse results of sprawl, is counting on county commissioners to obey the law and make the tough decisions.

Still, developers do raise valid concerns. Once growth boundaries are drawn, lot prices within them could rise unless there really is an adequate supply of readily developable land. Development codes affect whether empty urban lots can be used. So, the city and county should fast-track some targeted code revisions, such as limits on row housing and minimum lot size. This could encourage the use of lots that developers bypassed under current code restrictions. Also, the city and county should be certain they employ enough planning staff to craft accurate, flexible, workable policies. No land-use plan is perfect, but a better plan is needed, now.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board