Company wants gravel pits excluded from shoreline plan

A public hearing on Spokane Valley’s proposed Shoreline Master Program before the city’s planning commission generated a mix of negative and favorable comments.

The planning commission is reviewing the draft goals and policies to be used in the shoreline plan, which is undergoing a state-mandated update. At incorporation, the city inherited the county plan, which was approved in 1974.

“The goals and policies are purposely vague,” said senior planner Lori Barlow. They will be used to set the city’s regulations on shorelines, which include all land up to 200 feet from the ordinary high water mark.

The city’s plan includes the Spokane River, Shelley Lake and two gravel pits. Any body of water larger than 20 acres must be included in the plan. Nathan Smith of the law firm Witherspoon Kelley said he was representing Central Pre-Mix Development Corp. The company objects to the gravel pits being included in the plan, he said. “These uses and sites have been in place since 1970,” he said.

The gravel pits should only be included when they are no longer used to mine gravel and reclamation is complete, he said. “CPM has no intent of ceasing the gravel mining operation,” he said.

“Who made the mistake or was a mistake made?” said planning commissioner Steven Neill.

The gravel pits should be included in the city’s inventory but shouldn’t be regulated under the shoreline plan, Smith said. “I don’t think there was a mistake,” he said.

Barlow said the city has struggled with how to handle the gravel pits. “That shoreline edge is moving every day,” she said. The gravel pits are already regulated by state agencies and must pass annual inspections. City staff has been trying to figure out how to include the pits in the plan but not regulate them until they are inactive, she said.

“We don’t want to be in the business, frankly, of regulating the gravel mining,” she said.

Robin Bekkedahl of Avista Corp. said her company was concerned about a section that calls for utility companies to minimize impacts from maintenance of utility corridors and correct past impacts “if possible.”

“It says ‘if possible,’ ” commissioner John Carroll said. “Why would you not want to take the opportunity to fix past impacts if you can?”

Bekkedahl said she was concerned that fixing past impacts wasn’t clearly defined and the utility didn’t want to have to replant trees and brush that had been removed from underneath transmission lines. “We have cleared right of ways,” she said.

Barlow said the language was put in the policy to try to make it easier for utilities to fix old issues if they can and it will be better defined in the regulation section of the plan, she said.

Avista has been a good partner, Barlow said. “Most of their projects do in fact address past impacts,” she said.

Some who testified urged the planning commission not to change the draft that was prepared with the help of an advisory committee of government agencies, user groups, environmental groups, property owners and others.

Kitty Klitzke of Futurewise, a statewide environmental group, said the draft was a compromise. “We liked a lot of things that ended up in the draft,” she said. “We’re happy with the language as is. We think it represents a reasonable compromise.”

Resident Bill Abrahamse said he represented Trout Unlimited on the advisory group. “Our journey was very complex,” he said. “We debated and discussed. We came up with compromises. Nobody got everything they wanted. Please consider that we had a consensus.”

Commission chairman Bill Bates brought up a version of the goals and policies submitted to the City Council by Centennial Properties in 2011 after the advisory committee finished its work. The company, which had a representative on the committee, proposed adding a new section that called for the community as a whole to share in the regulatory burden of protecting the shoreline, not just property owners.

Centennial Properties, which owns a substantial section of shoreline, is owned by Cowles Co., which also owns The Spokesman-Review.

“That is not a policy you would find in anybody else’s goals and policies,” Barlow said. It would require the city to take on the financial burden, she said.

Several of the suggestions made by Centennial violate state law, according to a response sent to the city in July 2011 by Doug Pineo. Pineo, who retired from the Department of Ecology as a shore lands specialist in 2010, was also a member of the advisory group.

The company’s comments were received after the advisory group finished its work, Pineo wrote, and “are not consistent with the open, facilitated public process of the Shoreline Advisory Group to which Centennial Properties agreed, and in which they participated.”

The comments appear to attempt to unfairly influence the process and don’t reflect the consensus reached by the advisory group, Pineo wrote.

The draft goals and policies will be discussed further at the planning commission’s next meeting set for April 26.