Pullman City Council Plans To Adopt Comprehensive Plan Meanwhile, Whitman County Planning Mired In Controversy
City Council members are slated to adopt a new comprehensive plan tonight that would do more to protect the environment, open space and alternative transportation choices.
The plan has endured more than 60 hours of public hearings and repeated rewrites.
“We went to great lengths to open it up and try to get citizen input and make people feel welcome,” said Planning Director Pete Dickinson. “I think that has paid off in the end so that we really do have a plan that is acceptable to the community.”
Pullman’s methodical, even amicable approach to adopting a new plan contrasts with the convoluted, sometimes contentious comprehensive planning under way in Whitman County.
Pullman’s comprehensive plan has taken two years to create, debate and tweak into final form. Whitman County’s attempt to update its 1978 plan, meanwhile, has suffered setbacks since the process began in 1994.
After 22 community meetings in 1995, the effort lost momentum when one of Whitman County’s planners took another job in early 1996. To keep the process moving, commissioners decided to use the planner’s $35,155 salary to hire David Evans and Associates consulting firm to create a plan based on the public input. David Evans and Associates also drafted Pullman’s comprehensive plan.
But the consultant’s county plan faced significant opposition when it went public in December 1996. The Planning Commission rejected portions of the consultants’ work and decided on a new route: build the county’s plan section-by-section, weaving in part of the existing 1978 plan and useful portions of the consultant’s plan.
“By the time we’re done there will be substantial changes, but it will be done on a piece-by-piece basis,” said Whitman County Planner Mark Bordsen. “All we can say is stay tuned as we get to these specific pieces and then come in and participate.”
The planning issues - such as where to locate cell phone towers and where new development should occur - are of high interest to many citizens, yet there’s no master schedule of public hearings and no document for the public to review, since the Planning Commission is writing the plan as it addresses each segment. There are also no plans for a final public review of all the changes, Bordsen said.
Critics contend a piece-by-piece approach contradicts the meaning of a “comprehensive” plan, and could confuse the public by miring other planning issues in the process.
For example, Planning Commission member Clinton Miller hired a consultant last summer to prepare a planned residential amendment ordinance to allow development in Whitman County’s scablands.
Miller didn’t participate in related discussions because he owns land near Rock Lake that could be developed if the changes were adopted. The Planning Commission and county commissioners recently approved the significant changes to the county’s comprehensive plan, though the issue first came to them as one citizen’s request.
Last week, the Planning Commission held a public hearing on the telecommunications portion of the plan, which regulates cell phone towers and accessories. On the same night, it held a public hearing on a zoning change requested by two businessmen that would turn land zoned agricultural on Country Club Road to heavy industrial.
Albion resident Barbara Ryder, a Planning Commission member for eight years before her term expired in January, believes the commission should finish writing its comprehensive plan and open it up to debate before tackling other individual needs and special requests.
“They are very caught up with dealing with this on a piecemeal basis,” Ryder said.
Though no specific hearings have been set, the telecommunications portion of the comprehensive plan, rock crushing and mining section of the zoning ordinances and development in the Moscow-Pullman corridor are the next items slated for discussion.
Pullman City Council members will discuss the city’s proposed comprehensive plan tonight at 7:30 in City Hall.