So, What’s Going on with the Spokane County Urban Growth Area Update?

Public Hearing:
Thursday January 26th at 9am
Spokane County Planning Commission
LL Public Works Building
1026 W. Broadway Ave.
email comments to VMerriott@SpokaneCounty.org

Read the Futurewise comment letter here.

Boy, do we have our work cut out for us. Spokane County is undergoing a mandatory review of its Urban Growth Area (UGA), and they’ve come up with some interesting conclusions. As you know, a UGA is a boundary, usually surrounding cities, identifying where the cities in the county plan to grow in the future. The whole point of urban growth areas is two-fold: 1) reduce infrastructure costs by concentrating growth inside cities and 2) prevent sprawl from chewing up the rural landscape, working farms and forestland.

According to the County's own experts the existing UGA is larger than it needs to be to accommodate projected future growth. (Read the County's memo here). However none of the alternatives the county is considering contract the size of the UGA. Luckily the City of Spokane Plan Commission has created a new alternative that recommends a modest contraction that makes more sense around it's borders. Yet, judging by the looks of a recent Inlander article the county is not interested in right-sizing the UGA in fact, the County Commissioner's created their own proposal that seeks to expand it...a lot!

No one wants to pay more taxes to unnecessarily extend sewer, water and electricity lines, to say nothing of schools, roads and police/fire protection to newly-developed areas when we have plenty of room within the UGA to absorb growth. But the county has shown intentions of playing footsie with the boundaries, retracting a bit here, adding a lot more there, that could have the net result of putting taxpayer-subsidized sprawl in places no one agreed develomplent should go.

How the UGA works:

Here in Spokane, our collective urban growth area equals 89 square miles. That’s enough space, according to the county’s Land Quantity Analysis, to accommodate 117,800 new people by 2031.  Which is convenient, because the county says we’re expecting a shade under that – 113,541.

But something has happened since that Land Quantity Analysis was produced – the County now claims that they don’t have enough space for the new people. Huh? How did they come up with that? When they did the analysis they were already assuming that 30% of developable land will remain undeveloped, even though the experts and the Growth Management Hearings Board support research that suggests 25% is a more reasonable assumption. Yet somehow, the Commissioners are still looking for ways to add more land to this hugely cushioned boundary.

Not only that, but they’re planning to funnel 20% of future growth directly into rural lands. Is engineering an incursion of an additional 28,385 people into the rural landscape good for Spokane’s future? Especially given that the county itself estimates a surplus of 7,915 acres of commercial- and industrial-designated land that they expect will sit empty while the rural landscape gets converted to suburban sprawl? We think not!

To put this in perspective, our existing UGA is 89 square miles. That's over 2.5 times larger than the City of Paris, France. And Paris we ain't. Their population, at 2.2 million is almost 5 times the population of Spokane County. Using the county's own vacant land data, we have created a map to show just how much lands is lying vacant--meaning a developer would NOT have to knock down existing houses to develop inside the UGA as one Commissioner in the article claimed in the article.

Thank you Futurewise Members!

Spokane County recently tried to pull off an emergency Urban Growth Area expansion to accommodate its controversial new jail. Thanks to your efforts the jail is now on hold!

A new jail site located miles away from the Spokane County Courthouse is a bad idea. Spokane County's Urban Growth Area (UGA) already covers over 89 square miles, this is more than 2.5 times larger than the City of Paris, France which has nearly 5 times the population. Yet 25% of growth in the last decade has happened outside the UGA and the UGA itself is well below its planned capacity. The county’s own land quantity analysis shows that there are plenty of sites within the urban growth area to locate major public facilities. There is no emergency requiring an expansion. The county needs to lead the way and do more to focus growth inside existing cities rather than invest in sprawl, increasing costs to taxpayers and stretching our urban services to the breaking point. The vehicle trips generated by this project will cause congestion and wear and tear impacts to our transportation system, our air quality, and generate much more greenhouse gas emissions than if the county had chosen a site closer to the courthouse. It will also cost the county more in transportation costs to operate a new jail at this site. We can do better. We can plan our essential public facilities and our criminal justice program to be fiscally responsible, consistent with the Comprehensive Plan, and our communities' shared goals and values.

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