Everyone Affected Should Be Involved

How far should city and county governments go, in creating a fair process for the perennial combat between developers and their neighborhood-group foes?

As far as they possibly can.

For several years, local governments have worked to speed up and simplify their permitting processes. This helps attract beneficial jobs and tax base. Developers rightly have complained about convoluted procedures, contradictory bureacracies and endless opportunities for dilatory litigation.

But fair’s fair. Local government also should provide a clear, accessible process for the developers’ foes. The interests of neighborhood protection are important.

In Spokane, both the city and county have streamlined their permitting processes significantly. In the city, for example, developers can request a preliminary meeting with experts from permitting agencies. The experts point out shortcomings in the draft proposals. This helps developers to submit plans that comply with regulations.

On the neighborhoods’ side of the ledger, City Hall has encouraged the formation of neighborhood groups and has offered them a growing voice in city policy.

But there is more the city could do. This became clear when a procedural foul-up killed the appeal of a shopping center on Moran Prairie.

The City Council rejected the appeal because the Moran Prairie Neighborhood Association failed to pay, in time, for a hearing transcript. The neighbors, whose check arrived at City Hall on March 30, claim a city employee had told them the fee was due anytime before the April 6 hearing. But they also had received city invoices, one saying the fee was due March 21, another saying it was due March 26.

According to the city code, the fee was due March 1. The code mandates dismissal without timely payment. The City Council followed the law, as it must.

In the future, though, the city ought to remedy its obvious confusion and communicate its deadlines promptly and accurately to all concerned litigants. Some at City Hall are discussing the need for a user-friendly outline of the city’s procedural requirements. That’s a good idea.

It also is a good idea for neighborhood groups to hire lawyers. The Moran Prairie group is neither naive nor poverty-stricken. It represents hundreds of upscale homes, has its own Web page and has tried to kill business expansions that are a logical response to the sprawl that populated the prairie in the first place.

Large investments are at risk in zoning disputes like this, on all sides. Those investments call for competent processing - by the city, by the developers and, yes, by the neighborhoods.