Neighborhood chapter kept in plan

After hearing impassioned statements from the public, fast-paced arguments from their peers and the opinion of a previously absent councilman, the Spokane Valley City Council elected to keep a chapter on neighborhoods in its new comprehensive plan.

During deliberations two weeks ago, Mayor Diana Wilhite and Councilmen Steve Taylor, Mike DeVleming and Dick Denenny suggested that many of the chapter’s goals were repetitious or could be placed elsewhere.

A policy that new development should match the neighborhood around it also was seen as contradicting a city goal of developing a diverse housing stock.

Taylor volunteered to draw up a plan discussed at Tuesday’s meeting that would move some of the neighborhood policies and delete the chapter.

“How does anything change by eliminating the duplication?” Taylor asked Tuesday. “It still maintains the same substance of what’s in there.”

But Councilman Rich Munson, who was absent from the earlier meeting, sided with Councilmen Bill Gothmann and Gary Schimmels, who have argued from the outset that dispersing the city’s goals for neighborhoods would dilute their impact.

“It’s important, I think, for this community to have a focused chapter that only talks about neighborhoods,” Munson said.

At last week’s council meeting, eight residents offered robust public testimony supporting the chapter.

Wilhite, who initially indicated that she would be OK with moving neighborhood language to the land-use section, said Tuesday that she wouldn’t have a problem with leaving the neighborhood chapter in the document.

While she said repetition in the plan didn’t bother her, her colleague Denenny said the only original content in the chapter concerned the formation of neighborhood groups.

“Almost everything in this is a reiteration,” he said, suggesting that wording on neighborhoods elsewhere in the plan could be consolidated in the neighborhood chapter.

Gothmann and Schimmels stood firm in their support for a separate neighborhood chapter.

“If you go through and take duplication out, I think we’d save about a third of the paper” in the whole plan, Schimmels said.

“Repetition doesn’t bother me, doesn’t seem to bother the public,” said Gothmann, who advocated for a neighborhood chapter while a planning commissioner.

A motion to retain the chapter passed 6-1, with Taylor opposed.

The council will continue its discussion on what exactly the neighborhood chapter will include after a public hearing later this week.