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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Provisions for development nixed

A 260-home development slated for Spokane’s South Hill won a partial reprieve Tuesday when county commissioners sided with a developer who earlier called the county’s chief planning officer unqualified.

The commissioners unanimously dumped seven conditions imposed in January by Spokane County Hearing Examiner Michael Dempsey on the proposed Southridge development, which would include 161 houses and 99 apartment units. It would be built at the southeast corner of Havana Road and East 29th Avenue, just outside the Spokane city limits.

Dempsey usually has the last word on development projects in Spokane County, provided his conditions for construction aren’t appealed to county commissioners.

Southridge developers Cliff Cameron and Lanzce Douglass filed their appeal after Dempsey imposed a must-do list of nearly 100 conditions. The two challenged only seven of the most arduous conditions the examiner imposed. Their Seattle attorney, Michael Murphy, had asserted that Dempsey “may not understand his job.”

Tuesday, Cameron’s only comment on the commissioners’ ruling was, “I just think it’s a good decision, and that’s all I have to say.”

Dempsey said he does not comment on the cases that come before him.

The commission did not criticize Dempsey. Rather, its members quickly voted after Commissioner Todd Mielke finished reading aloud their four-page decision, then moved on without discussion. The decision said the site-specific conditions weren’t necessary because there are already development rules on the books.

The 52-acre lot on which Southridge is proposed features more than an acre of wetlands and borders a street that seasonally floods. Some basements in the area have flooded and septic systems have failed.

Neighbors feared those and other land conditions, such as traffic, weren’t being addressed by county planners or developers. Dempsey sided with the neighbors after they hired experts to challenge the traffic, water and environment reports submitted by Cameron and Douglass.

The conditions commissioners rejected would have forced the developers to:

• Conduct a traffic visibility study to make sure future Southridge residents wouldn’t be in danger when pulling onto a long blind curve on 29th Avenue, the primary road to the development.

• Wait until improvements are made to the nearby Thor-Freya couplet before conducting a required traffic volume study to ensure that local infrastructure could handle traffic from the development.

• Take special measures to protect downhill landowners from any groundwater or storm water problems arising from excavation and paving of Southridge.

• Take certain steps to protect wells neighboring the project.

• Study the fairy shrimp populations in ponds on the property.

• Take steps to prevent flooding on Havana Road and the west end of the property.

• Ensure that there would be no flooding in the basements of the new houses to be built in Southridge.

Commissioners concluded that existing storm water and traffic-engineering requirements are sufficient to handle most Southridge problems and that requiring developers to wait until current work on the couplet is finished before they can study traffic is unreasonable.

On two of the counts on which they overruled Dempsey, commissioners said there was no evidence in the record supporting his decision. The record contains no proof of the existence of neighboring wells or of fairy shrimp in the ponds, they said. Neighbors had presented proof that the shrimp existed, but only after Dempsey’s hearing, when the record was closed.

Property owners neighboring Southridge said they would appeal the commission’s decision to Superior Court.

Cameron and Douglass will be in front of Dempsey again today with a 179-home project planned for Spokane Valley. Cameron earlier tried to get Dempsey removed from hearing that project. A letter war between the two followed.

“I believe that it is vital for all participants in the hearing process to feel the hearing examiner is fair and impartial,” Cameron said in a letter to Spokane County’s planning director. “Based on my experience on these projects, I no longer feel that the process is fair or impartial.”

Dempsey responded by stating he would not remove himself from the Ponderosa hearing because he didn’t have a conflict of interest and had ruled fairly on Cameron’s projects for more than nine years.

“It would establish a poor precedent if I disqualified myself to hear the matter in the absence of any demonstrated conflict of interest or violation of the appearance of fairness doctrine,” Dempsey said.