Stop Spokane County from getting cul-de-sacked!
Tomorrow there's a hearing on the proposal to expand Spokane County's already outsized Urban Growth Area when the Growth Management Steering Committee of Elected Officials meets from 9am to noon in the Spokane County Public Works Building, 1026 W Broadway Ave. Arrive after 8:30 a.m. to sign in to comment.
The expansion is unneeded.
A little background: This hearing stems from the review of the Urban Growth Area by Spokane County and its cities and towns. The Urban Growth Area is the area designated to accommodate projected urban growth and development for twenty years and was first established in 2001. The review determines whether to expand or retract the existing Urban Growth Area.
As someone who has been to the open houses during the review, I can attest to the makeup of the participants: Mostly developers who see the expansion as something cheaply akin to a gold rush.
Spokane is in a crucial development stage. As local environmental advocate Kitty Klitzke pointed out at the time of the meeting in 2009, “our county’s Urban Growth Area (UGA) already covers over 89 square miles, this is over 2.5 times larger than the City of Paris, France. And Paris we ain’t. Their population, at 2.2 million is almost 5 times the population of Spokane County.”
In the last decade, 25 percent of county growth has occurred in rural spaces while enough land already existed in the urban growth area to accommodate their projections.
All the more reason to focus growth inward as the city of Spokane's infrastructure is strained due to unsustainable sprawl.
From Kitty Klitzke: "Luckily the City of Spokane Plan Commission has created a new alternative that recommends a modest contraction that makes more sense around it's borders. No one wants to pay more taxes to unnecessarily extend sewer, water and electricity lines, to say nothing of schools, roads and police/fire protection to newly-developed areas when we have plenty of room within the UGA to absorb growth. But the county has shown intentions of playing footsie with the boundaries, retracting a bit here, adding a lot more there, that could have the net result of putting taxpayer-subsidized sprawl in places the community does not want development to go."
Read more from Futurewise HERE.
