Dispute delays South Side pool proposal

Kids and adults may eventually cavort in a beachlike pool, blast down a 150-foot water slide or glide down the “lazy river” of a $5 million water park planned at 61st and Freya. But the area was full of alligators Tuesday.

Spokane County commissioners balked – again – at concessions the Spokane City Council wants in exchange for an agreement to extend water and sewer service to the proposed water park.

“The county is trying to offer a gift horse, and it is being treated more like a Trojan horse,” Commissioner Bonnie Mager said. “I don’t understand that.”

Commissioner Todd Mielke said county officials are taking a regional approach to recreational programs such as swimming pools, and noted that the proposed water park is likely to be used as much by city residents as by county residents.

Commission Chairman Mark Richard said he “had a little bit of zip in my step” after what he thought was an understanding with City Council members Monday night, but the last-minute addition of a new demand “risks the entire project.”

So commissioners arranged another one-week extension Tuesday in the often-postponed deadline for awarding a construction contract and sent a draft agreement back to the City Council for more reconsideration.

County officials had hoped to start construction early this year, but got tangled in state Growth Management Act regulations.

The act says it is inappropriate to extend urban services outside an “urban growth area” – unincorporated land designated for eventual annexation – except to protect health, safety or the environment. It doesn’t matter that there are city water and sewer lines in the street next to the water park site, which is adjacent to the outer boundary of the city’s urban growth area on Moran Prairie.

In exchange for an acknowledgement that groundwater would be better protected by city sewers than a $500,000 on-site treatment plant, city officials wanted a development compact in which county officials agreed to mitigate any problems caused by the pool and to cooperate with any future effort to annex the site.

Although willing to provide mitigation for the water park, commissioners objected to the annexation clause last week and sent the 20-page draft agreement back to the City Council.

In a 6-1 vote Monday, the council substituted a requirement for the county to help the city collect fees from developers to mitigate harmful effects of any projects in the urban growth area – where city and county officials share planning responsibilities.

Commissioners objected to what they said would be a requirement for them to help the city collect yet-undetermined development fees on their constituents in an unincorporated portion of the county.

“We are being asked to approve a fee that has not yet been determined, for projects that have not yet come forward – and I have a problem with that,” Mielke said.

Asked whether the City Council’s previous request for an annexation covenant wouldn’t have been preferable, Mielke said he thinks the city doesn’t need the covenant because it already has enough agreements with other property owners in the area.

Even if a county covenant wouldn’t sway the outcome of an annexation effort, “annexation issues aren’t fights that we like to do, politically,” Mielke said.