Land-use plan hits billboards
Billboards would eventually disappear from Spokane Valley and the young city would create a downtown for itself under the planning commission’s new draft of Spokane Valley’s comprehensive plan.
The commission presented its recommendations on the 20-year land-use document to the City Council at its meeting Tuesday night.
“I think the biggest challenge coming out of this is a city center,” said David Crosby, chairman of the planning commission.
The plan originally offered three broad options for future land use. One was characterized by clustering businesses at intersections, one that would leave things more or less as is and the third was the city center option now endorsed by the planning commission.
The first draft of the plan was written by the city’s planning staff. Over the last several weeks, commissioners went through the 300-page document line by line and made changes in all of its chapters, Crosby said.
One of those changes would be a cap on billboards. Current regulations prohibit companies from erecting new billboards in the city but allow them to replace those already up. Under the commission’s recommendations, old billboards could not be replaced and would eventually vanish.
Council members received a clean copy of the new plan only hours before the meeting and said they had not studied individual changes enough yet to form opinions.
After the meeting, Councilman Dick Denenny said public opinion tends to support a billboard ban and referenced a 2002 Spokane County advisory vote on the billboard issue.
About 57 percent of voters said the signs should come down. The ban was never enacted, however.
Voters might not have supported the ban, though, Councilman Mike DeVleming said, if they had known it could create expensive lawsuits. In fact, Lamar Advertising Co., one of the nation’s largest billboard companies, had unsuccessfully sued the county to keep the billboard issue off the ballot.
Other large changes to the proposed comprehensive plan include the addition of a chapter on neighborhood planning and the designation of State Route 27 (Pines Road) as an aesthetic corridor subject to stricter business-sign regulations.
Comprehensive plans for cities are required by the state’s Growth Management Act to accommodate population growth inside the urban growth boundary. They encompass land use, capital projects, transportation, economic development and other topics.
“The single biggest issue really has to do with business corridors,” Commissioner Bill Gothmann said. “The residential areas are very similar to what we have now.”