Fervent Crowd Clashes Over Land-Use Plan Nearly 200 Attend County Commission Hearing On Growth Ordinance

Private-property activists and land lovers clashed Tuesday night over how far Spokane County should go to safeguard its environmental bounty.

Nearly 200 people crowded a county commission meeting, some thumping the U.S. Constitution and quoting James Madison, trying to sway the three-member board.

Commissioner Steve Hasson said it was the biggest turnout in his seven years in office.

The board delayed any action until it could digest the public comments, which dragged on through the night.

At issue is a critical-areas ordinance required by the 1990 state Growth Management Act to protect environmentally sensitive areas, specifically wetlands, fish and wildlife habitat, the aquifer, flood zones and sites with unstable slopes and soils.

“I paid off my property,” Chattaroy farmer Ron Ogle said. “I thought I owned it - until you came up with this ordinance.

“You take away everything I’ve got and you’re coming against my family.”

The sorest point among the home builders and agricultural interests was a proposed list of stream buffers. Development would be forced 250 feet back from major rivers or streams with 20-foot-wide channels.

How else can the county save 13,000 wetlands and hundreds of miles of shoreline, proponents asked.

Newman Lake resident Linda Pool said she shares the neighborhood with swans, mallards, Canada geese, great blue herons and many other species.

“Walking in these areas renews me, especially when seeing a pileated woodpecker or a calf moose,” she said.

Last August, after nearly three years, two dozen citizens representing a crosssection of special interests crafted a critical-areas ordinance.

But the county planning commission voted 6-1 last November to make a few revisions tightening up the advisory group’s recommended protections for rivers and wetlands.

Developers backed by Capitol Hill lobbyists applied the pressure. Environmentalists fought back.

Rather than approve the planning panel’s 67-page ordinance last month, county commissioners set the Tuesday night hearing.

“Environmentalists want a 3,000-mile buffer around every wetland, and the development industry wants a 3-inch buffer,” one frustrated county planner said before the meeting.

The debate has forced Spokane County to miss - badly - its September 1992 state-imposed deadline to pass the measure.

While the Growth Management Act allows economic sanctions for tarrying, regulators have not yet imposed them anywhere in the state, choosing instead to credit counties for making good-faith progress.

County resident Robert Hilton said despite the countless public meetings on the ordinance, this was the first he had heard of it. He urged caution.

“We have endangered species acts already on the books,” he said.

Quipped another resident, M.E. Jacobs, “Sasquatch is an endangered species in the state of Washington. That’s stupid.”

The opposition sounded like a rally for last year’s failed Referendum 48, which would have forced governments to compensate land owners for onerous restrictions.

Bart Haggin, one of the county’s best-known conservationists and philanthropists, said misinformation was spreading faster than the early February floodwaters.

“This is mostly common-sense stuff. I don’t think anyone’s going to feel they’ve been violated,” he said. “People need to take a different view of the land. It’s not a car. The land is something you rent from generation to generation. You never really own it.”

Commissioner John Roskelley, a former planning board member, is a staunch advocate of the ordinance. Commissioners Phil Harris and Hasson are sympathetic to developers.

Harris said he would delay a vote until further study.

“It (the ordinance) might be sent back to the drawing board,” he said.

, DataTimes