Ferry Growth Plan Rejected State Says County’S Lands Plan Fails To Consider The Best Available Science

Fri., Aug. 7, 1998

By John Craig johnc@spokesman.com

Ferry County is back in the growth management dog house.

The Eastern Washington Growth Management Hearings Board has ruled that revisions to the county’s comprehensive plan violate the state Growth Management Act by failing to consider the “best available science.”

The hearings board gave the county four months to fix the plan.

Ferry County Prosecutor Steve Graham said the county won’t appeal the order, which supported the county on other issues.

“We’re going to consider the opinion of a wide array of scientists, not just scientists from Fish and Wildlife and the Department of Ecology,” Graham said.

The ruling by the hearings board was in response to a challenge by a group called Concerned Friends of Ferry County.

Friends attorney Cleve Ives said the comprehensive plan amendment was intended to resolve one of the deficiencies the hearings board found early last year in the first plan.

Instead of fixing the problems, Ives said the county “borrowed policies from its successful interim critical areas ordinance, systematically removed nearly all of the scientific recommendations, and then tried to present this stitched-up corpse as a legitimate policy.”

Graham said the comprehensive plan is just a framework for regulations, and the interim critical areas ordinance remains in effect until a permanent ordinance is adopted. He acknowledged that county officials attempted to shift the proposed regulations “to try to protect private property rights, and we got stung a little bit.”

A private biologist reviewed and endorsed the amended comprehensive plan after it was adopted, but the growth hearings board said that was too late to count, Graham said.

Meanwhile, the prosecutor said he plans to seek dismissal of a Concerned Friends lawsuit challenging the board’s approval of the county’s plan to restrict growth in rural areas. He contends the Friends gave the county the wrong kind of notice of the appeal in Thurston County Superior Court.

No trial or hearing date has been set in that case.

The county adopted the disputed plan to restrict rural development only after being threatened with loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in state-shared tax receipts.

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