City Council debates need for historic preservation

The Spokane Valley City Council spent the majority of its meeting Tuesday evening debating whether a historic preservation ordinance is a good or a bad thing for the city.

At one point, council member Arne Woodard suggested staff conduct a survey of historic property owners before doing anything else.

“Maybe we should put out a public notice?” Woodard suggested. “Maybe we will find out that no one outside this room gives a rip.”

Spokane Valley does not have a historic preservation ordinance and last year after The Plantation – an old restaurant partly constructed out of river rock and considered a landmark by many – was demolished, some suggested it was time to change that.

Gloria Mantz, Spokane Valley development engineer, was presenting staff findings to the council, which peppered her with questions.

Mantz explained that if Spokane Valley adopts a historic preservation ordinance then it must keep an inventory of historic properties.

“That is just a database and properties on there are not protected and they receive no incentives,” Mantz said. There are 264 Spokane Valley properties listed on the state’s inventory but many of them are listed wrongly.

“They are in Millwood or in the county,” Mantz said, “or they are listed because they are more than 50 years old.”

She explained that only listing on a local historic registry provides protection for a historic building, and that Spokane Valley has leeway in how a historic preservation ordinance should be worded.

The ordinance would be managed by a historic preservation commission – much like the planning commission oversees and debates changes to zoning and other land issues.

Most likely, Mantz said, Spokane Valley would enter into an agreement with the city of Spokane’s historic preservation office, but some staff time would be needed to get the ordinance off the ground.

“We don’t know how many applications we will get,” Mantz said, adding that the city may want to keep a consultant on retainer to take care of training early on.

Historic properties on the National Register of Historic Places may be eligible for a 20 percent investment tax credit on rehabilitation projects.

Mantz explained that where a property could be nominated for the local historic registry by anybody, the owner would have to consent to the final registry.

If a building is on the local historic registry and the owner wants to tear it down, Mantz said the owner would need permission from the historic preservation commission.

That prompted council member Ed Pace to ask who’s benefitting from historic preservation ordinances other than government that gets bigger because a preservation ordinance has to be managed.

“I don’t see why anybody would want to do this,” Pace said.

“Preserving historic buildings brings value to the community,” Mantz said, but that didn’t gain much traction.

The evening’s only clear statement in support of an ordinance, before Mantz was directed to go back and do more research on the language of the ordinance and options for property owners to opt out, came from Mayor Dean Grafos.

“Preserving historic buildings gives the city a sense of place,” Grafos said. “If we tore all the old buildings down we’d look just like Bellevue.”