Buffer Beef Riverfront Property Owners Fighting Setback Requirement

It’s a dream held by many waterfront property owners.

Someday, when the time is right and the money available, they’ll build that fabulous view home on the water.

But for many Valley residents with land along the Spokane River, that dream is now illegal.

The realization of this has shocked and angered more than 100 Valley property owners, who have joined forces to try to amend the county’s two-year-old critical areas ordinance.

They’re getting help from the Spokane Home Builders Association, which fought the 1996 creation of a 250-foot buffer in unincorporated areas along the Spokane River and other major streams. New development is prohibited within the buffer, as are external changes to existing structures. So are most changes to landscaping.

Proponents of the buffer, such as the Washington Environmental Council, say the restriction is needed to protect the waterway, its wildlife and natural habitat.

Landowners such as Dick Baldwin disagree.

“They started 50 or 100 years too late if they wanted a 250-foot corridor,” said Baldwin, whose land is sandwiched between two lots with homes right on the water.

“I don’t think it’s fair to the people who have waited to build,” the retiree said. “That (land) was my retirement income.”

Spokane’s Board of County Commissioners adopted the critical areas ordinance in August of 1996, after several years of controversy, appeals and alterations. It was required under the Growth Management Act.

At first, the board set the buffer zone at 200 feet. It later approved a 250-foot buffer, after environmental groups protested and the Eastern Washington Growth Management Hearings Board ruled the county wasn’t using “best available science” to create the ordinance.

Opponents of the ordinance hope science will now allow for an amendment to the law.

They’ve raised about $7,000 toward a $12,000 study by Stephen Mader, an environmental scientist with the Portland office of CH2MHill. They hope Mader’s findings will provide persuasive arguments for smaller buffers, which would vary in width along the river according to the vulnerability of the specific sites.

If Mader finds evidence that smaller buffers would not harm the river or wildlife habitat, the group will go to county commissioners and ask for changes in the ordinance.

“We hope to see a recommendation for an ordinance that can be easy to administer and that protects people’s property rights,” said Suzanne Knapp, government affairs director of the Spokane Home Builders Association. Knapp is coordinating the amendment effort. She hopes to have the study results by December.

“The focus and the effort is to work with the (county),” said Brian Balch, an attorney who bought a riverfront lot with friend Gary Matthews several years ago. The two men and their wives planned to build side-by-side homes north of Millwood by year 2000.

They were surprised when they were turned down for building permits.

The deadline for vesting under the previous setback - 50 feet under the Shoreline Management Act - was August of 1996. Matthews thought his preliminary plat was enough to vest him.

“I felt I was a very informed property owner,” said Matthews, who planned to build a house 80 to 100 feet from the river.

Unlike most property owners, Matthews wasn’t extremely upset when he first learned he would have to build so far back from the river. He figured he could plant a large lawn and put a volleyball court between his house and the water.

Then he learned that he couldn’t plant grass or any non-native vegetation within the 250-foot buffer. A volleyball court definitely was out.

“You can’t legally cut down a tree,” he grumbled.

Kenneth Gudgel is even more frustrated.

The Valley man has spent about $20,000 on a drainfield, utility improvements and architectural plans for the log home he’d hoped to build on riverfront property he’s owned since 1983.

But he didn’t get his building permit in time.

“We were a little short of funds, so we held off,” the Valley pharmacist said.

“We still have the blueprints,” he said. “It would’ve been a dream house.”

Like many of his neighbors, Gudgel is putting his hopes in the amendment effort.

The bulk of the group are property owners on the north bank of the Spokane River, north of Millwood. Most, Knapp said, have property within the Interim Urban Growth Area.

They don’t feel it’s fair that across the river, in Millwood, lots still are held to the 50-foot setback. To the west, in Spokane, lots along the Spokane River have 50- to 100-foot setbacks, depending upon location.

That will likely change within the next few years, according to officials with the state Department of Ecology. Legislation passed three years ago will eventually require all jurisdictions to integrate the Shoreline Management Act and the Growth Management Act, and set more consistent setback requirements.

Unfortunately, DOE Shorelands Specialist Doug Pineo said, the mandate is thus far unfunded, a fact that will likely slow the process.

As for the county’s critical-areas ordinance, frustration hasn’t been reserved for property owners alone. John Nunnery, Spokane county’s shoreline administrator, also believes the two-year-old ordinance could be improved with a few good tweaks.

It’s Nunnery’s job to work with landowners to find legal alternatives to their now-illegal landscaping and building plans. That can mean planting native vegetation, or applying for “reasonable-use exceptions.” People with very small lots, he said, can be excused from some restrictions.

Even so, Nunnery says the law ignores the existence of current development within the buffer zone. Such development - heavy along some parts of the river - obviously impacts the “natural corridor” the ordinance proposes to create, Nunnery said.

“It also assumes there’s habitat there that needs to be protected.” In other words, existing asphalt is treated much the same as pristine natural habitat.

“It needs a lot of work,” Nunnery said. “But, we’ve been working with people trying to find ways to make it work.”