Spokane County gets yet another pen-lashing for multiple violations of the state’s Growth Management Act
With unusually blunt language, the Eastern Washington Growth Management Hearings Board has once again treated Spokane County harshly on a land use appeal to the three member panel.
In a decision announced last week involving a citizen and Neighborhood Alliance challenge to the county and the proprietors of McGlades restaurant on Highway 2 north of Spokane, the Hearings Board found the county in error in all six issues raised in the appeal.
As the Hearings Board noted in its ruling, the McGlades property was permitted for use as a rural produce stand in 1984, but has since morphed into a full-service restaurant, complete with alcohol service and a drive up espresso stand. The 4.2 acres on which the restaurant now sits is referred to in the record as a “bunny tooth” of commercial property intruding into a rural residential area.
The Center for Justice represented the petitioners and argued on their behalf before the Hearings Board.
It wasn’t just the number of errors that drew the Hearings Board’s wrath. It was the county’s apparently willful decisions to try to bypass state environmental assessment procedures and its own comprehensive plan that elicited the harshest rebukes.
“The County deferred environmental review to the project stage, which essentially makes the SEPA (State Environmental Policy Act) process moot,” the Hearings Board ruled. “SEPA is to provide agencies environmental information prior to making decisions, not after they were made.”
Significantly, neither the County nor the restaurant owners contested two of the six issues that the Center argued on behalf of the petitioners.
Because the Hearings Board also found that the County’s decisions in the case “would substantially interfere” with three provisions of the state’s Growth Management Act, it capped its ruling with a formal finding of “invalidity.” This last ruling was accompanied with a detailed order and timeline for the County to come into compliance.
“It is significant that the Board ruled in our favor on all six legal issues,” said Rick Eichstaedt, the CFJ attorney representing the neighbors and the Neighborhood Alliance. “This decision makes it clear that the County must analyze the environmental impacts of its actions when it amends its comprehensive plan and zoning ordinance, and that it can’t defer until a development proposal is submitted. It also affirms that urban development, such as commercial business, are supposed to be the exception and not the rule in rural areas outside the Urban Growth Boundary. By using the finding of invalidity, the Board sent a clear message that the County’s actions violated the fundamental goals of the state’s Growth Management Act.”
The tone and sweep of the Hearings Board’s ruling is strikingly similar to its rulings in 2005 and 2006 when it found that the County had unlawfully allowed expansions of its urban growth areas to accommodate developers on the Five Mile Prairie and in the Palisades area west of Spokane. Our story about those decisions can be found here. The Center represented petitioners in Five Mile and Palisades cases as well.
Another key factor in the Hearings Board’s decision in the McGlades case is the fact that the restaurant is located in a critical aquifer recharge area (CARA) “with a rating of high susceptibility. What that meant, the Hearings Board ruled, is that the County needed to exercise special care in evaluating how allowing commercial development in the area could ultimately affect groundwater. And it hadn’t done so.
Given the inadequacy of the environmental review, the Hearings Board found, “the County failed to (sic) its duty to protect a designated critical area or, at the very minimum, use best available science to determine future impacts to the CARA from the increased septic effluent and stormwater runoff from an expansion of the business.”
“It is unfortunate that citizens must take legal action against the County to ensure that it follows the law and its own comprehensive plan,” said Eichstaedt. “The good news is that the Board’s decision will make sure that proper SEPA analysis is considered prior to making significant comprehensive plan and rezone decisions. This is a problem not only with Spokane County, but we have seen it in the City of Spokane’s decision to approve the Southgate big box stores. This decision certainly will be helpful in the Center’s appeal of that decision.”