Lawsuit Seeks New Growth Boundaries Developer Harley Douglass Says County Limits Invalid

A developer is suing to make Spokane County immediately redraw boundaries that designate where urban development is allowed.

The suit by Harley Douglass could set back county efforts to comply with the state’s Growth Management Act, said County Commissioner Kate McCaslin. It would force staff and commissioners to redo work that took months to complete.

It’s unclear whether the suit, if successful, would also open rural areas to urban subdivisions while the “interim urban growth boundaries” are being redrawn.

Douglass and 10 other developers already have successfully appealed the county’s boundaries on the basis that they’re too tight. The boundaries are supposed to be generous enough to accommodate 20 years of growth.

As drawn, the boundaries “are going to put a stranglehold on development and the growth of this community,” Douglass said. “And if we’re not growing, we’re dying.”

Each of the appellants owns land left out of the boundaries. Unless the property is already subdivided - and Douglass contends that most of his land is - it cannot be cut into lots smaller than 5 acres.

“That was the issue (behind the appeal),” said McCaslin, who contends the developers’ actions are self-serving. “It wasn’t this ‘greater good’ thing. It was specific property that they wanted in” the boundary.

However, there’s no guarantee the developers’ land would be designated urban even if the boundaries are expanded.

The GMA hearing board for Eastern Washington agreed with the developers that city figures - on which county commissioners relied when they drew the boundaries - were faulty because they included land that cannot be developed. Among the land counted as buildable: property developed as a church, a library, a city park and a youth center.

But the board told the county it can fix the problems when it drafts final urban growth boundaries, sometime next year.

In a suit filed Jan. 22 in Thurston County Superior Court, Douglass demands that the problem be corrected now. Until it is fixed, he argues, the interim boundaries, which must be drawn before permanent boundaries can be set, are invalid, said Douglass’ attorney, Michael Murphy.

County officials contend the board didn’t find the boundaries invalid, only that they probably require expansion.

If Murphy is right that the boundaries are invalid, then landowners outside the growth boundaries should be able to apply for new subdivisions under the old rules, said Spokane land-use attorney F.J. Dullanty.

Those rules allowed as many as 3.5 lots per acre on much of the land that has since been designated rural.

“However, my understanding is that the county would refuse” such subdivision applications, Dullanty wrote in a January letter to some of his clients. “It may require court action” to force the county to comply.

Dullanty said Wednesday that he wasn’t implying that his clients should sue the county, just that “you need to take a proactive role in your property rights. You need to be involved in the process.”

Dullanty’s letter warns that the county “is thinking of” denying all new building permits for urban growth outside the boundaries, even on land that’s subdivided. McCaslin and other county officials say they have no intention of denying such permits.

, DataTimes