Valley City Council: Proposed rezones draw opposition

Proposed rezones were the hot topic at the Spokane Valley City Council’s regular meeting Tuesday as a score of residents showed up primarily to voice their opposition.

Of 16 proposed zoning amendments, the most contentious was a recommendation to rezone a 96-acre area in and around the I-90 and Barker Road interchange from the corridor mixed-use designation to a regional commercial one.

Residents of the area in question said they were unaware of the rezoning processes and that their properties were not zoned as residential areas in the first place, but instead under the corridor mixed-use designation. However Greg McCormick, community development planning manager for the city, said that the area has long been zoned as regional commercial, while only officially corridor mixed-use for a couple months, and the current proposed rezone is much more a reversion to the original designation, rather than a significant new rezone.

The area had held the regional commercial designation up until Sept. 2007 when the city of Spokane Valley implemented long-standing zoning designations, including to rezone the area in question as corridor mixed-use, a commercial designation itself. (Public hearings for this and other zoning implementations were held from the latter part of 2006 through spring of 2007.) Recently, however, business owners in the area had approached city planners and asked the area be zoned back to regional commercial, as it had been prior to 2001, and that was the motivation for the current proposed change, said McCormick.

Resident Diane Stavish said she and others felt blindsided by the proposed changes since the original public notice of the rezone was published in the Spokane Valley News Herald, saying “Nobody reads that (paper).”

The News Herald has held the designation of the city of Spokane Valley’s “official newspaper” since March 2004, meaning that the News Herald is where all city legal notices, including public hearings regarding rezones, are published. (The city council originally named The Spokesman-Review the city’s official newspaper in 2003, however changed to the News Herald “as a cost savings mechanism,” per the 2004 resolution.)

Residents were also particularly concerned that the proposed rezone would increase their property taxes. Eighty-year old Hugh Thompson, who said he’s lived at his home on East Broadway Avenue for 44 years, stated “there’s only one Social Security check coming in there, so if you raise my property taxes, you might bankrupt me.”

Councilman Richard Munson addressed some of the residents’ most pressing concerns. Munson, who served for four years as the chair of the Spokane County Board of Equalization, which he describes as an appellate for people who feel their properties have been unfairly assessed, observed that regarding taxation, while “it remains a mystery” as to how certain property assessments are arrived at, he said, “there’s no guarantee you’re going to see a change in your property taxes.”

Munson added afterward that it was “not reasonable” for owners to expect their property taxes to go up. “It’s a long-term plan,” he affirmed. “It’s not something that’s going to happen tomorrow.”

Joe Hollenback, a sales analyst at the Spokane County Assessor’s office agrees. “It’s difficult to evaluate what’s going to happen value-wise,” he says, adding that when such rezones occur, how, or even if, the value of a given property changes “depends on the dynamics of that particular market.”

Mike Basinger, the city planner who presented the zoning amendments, explained the reasoning for the proposed rezone as part of a long-term plan. “Obviously, Barker and I-90 isn’t completely commercial uses at this time, but it’s part of the 20-year vision that we’d like to see that area converted to a regional commercial-type designation.”

In discussion on the issue, council members generally supported this long-term vision. “In our modern-day society,” said Councilman Bill Gothmann, “people do their commercial activity near interstate on-ramps and off-ramps.” He continued, “Twenty years from now, the city will look at Barker and I-90 as a fairly large commercial area,” adding that city staff is “right on target” with the proposed rezone.

Six of the seven council members affirmed their consensus with the proposed rezone amendments, which are scheduled to have their second reading at next week’s regular meeting, when they will be up for decision.

Councilman Mike DeVleming, the one who declined to join the consensus, said in remarks after the meeting that he would have liked to get more input from property owners before the council moved forward. “They didn’t see it coming,” he lamented, but conceded that regardless, the area is “heading for commercial use.”

In other news, Mayor Diana Wilhite appointed Peggy Doering, Doug Kelly, and Cal Clausen to the five-person Lodging Tax Advisory Committee, and Deputy Mayor Steve Taylor was reappointed as the city council liaison. Kelly and Clausen will serve for two years, Doering and Taylor for one.