Speakers Line Up On Growth Growth Management Hearing Brings Out Curious, Angry
About 150 people gathered in a suburban school Wednesday to talk about a line that will split Spokane County into urban and rural neighborhoods.
Some were curious and others concerned. A few were angry.
“Growth management appears to be in conflict with property rights,” one man said in mock innocence, as the crowd responded with laughter and applause.
Spokane County commissioners called the North Side meeting, and two previous ones in the Valley and Cheney, to hear comments about the “interim urban growth boundaries.”
Inside the boundaries, which commissioners plan to set next week, government must provide sewers and other urban services. Small lots will be the rule.
Outside, new lots can be no smaller than 10 acres, at least for the time being.
The boundaries, can be reviewed in about a year and every five years thereafter, under the state’s Growth Management Act.
Most speakers Wednesday complained their land is outside boundaries proposed by a steering committee. Developers warn that those boundaries, which exclude much of the North Side and Valley, would stifle the economy.
Some landowners said they planned to sell off pieces of land to fund their retirement.
“Are we going to be like farmers? Are you going to pay us for land that must be left fallow?” asked Mary Jones, whose 18 acres in the Valley would be designated rural if commissioners don’t tweak the proposed boundaries.
The urban area would cover the county like the remnants of December’s snow if commissioners tried to please Jones and everyone else counting on their land as an investment.
“As far as I’m concerned, you could look at the whole county and put it into your plan,” one man said, drawing applause. “We’re not an agricultural community anymore.”
Only a handful of speakers asked that commissioners adopt the proposed boundaries without changes.
Five Mile Prairie activist Doug Metcalf read from a magazine article that described urban sprawl as a plague on the American landscape.
“That was written in 1961,” Metcalf said. “We’ve had 35 years to get our ship in order and it still hasn’t happened.”
The hearing was held at Northwood Junior High, part of the Mead School District, where phenomenal growth in recent years has come largely from people escaping the city.
Many of the subdivisions and five-acre lots in the school district wouldn’t exist if legislators had passed the Growth Management Act in 1970 rather than 1990.
And the second high school the district is building on former farm land wouldn’t be needed.
, DataTimes