Growth meeting schedule frustrates
Some Spokane Valley residents who are pushing for a chapter on neighborhoods in the city’s new Comprehensive Plan are frustrated that the City Council will discuss the matter further on Tuesday, two days before a public hearing on the plan.
“(We) don’t want to rock the boat, we just want to make sure we can get on the boat,” said Mary Pollard, a Greenacres resident who helped write the neighborhood chapter while the plan was before the Planning Commission.
At the Feb. 21 meeting, several council members suggested that the neighborhood chapter goals were repeated elsewhere in the comprehensive plan or contradicted policies in other chapters. Some suggested relocating some of the neighborhood language and deleting the chapter entirely.
At that meeting council members decided to take up the issue again Tuesday during a study session, which does not usually include public comment.
A general public hearing on the comprehensive plan is scheduled for Thursday.
“It’s just a timing situation in trying to get everything accomplished,” said Mayor Diana Wilhite.
“We still want people to come comment on it even though we’ve made changes,” she said.
The council can revisit any section of the comprehensive plan before approving it in its entirety later this month.
Eight people, mostly from the Greenacres and the Ponderosa neighborhoods, testified in support of the chapter at last Tuesday’s council meeting during open public comment on any topic.
“People wanted to get in their viewpoint before they had the discussion closed to the public,” said Ponderosa resident Judy Belous.
She reiterated a point made by Councilman Bill Gothmann, who said at the earlier meeting that the majority of the public comment on the plan he heard while a planning commissioner dealt with neighborhoods.
“This would make it look as though they are just ignoring input from the people,” Belous said.
Gail Stiltner, who has worked extensively on Ponderosa issues, wouldn’t go so far as to say the council intended to circumvent public comment by discussing the chapter Tuesday.
“I think it just happened,” she said of the schedule.
But she said her neighbors are intent on telling the council that they feel neighborhoods should have their own place in the plan.
“Even assuming that the wording and intent that is currently in this chapter is addressed in other parts of the plan, the effect would be diluted and neighbors/neighborhoods would be diminished in the plan,” she wrote in a recent letter to the council.