In Illinois, state regulation of growth and development is an issue discussed only by a small coterie of planners, but in the state of Washington it is the hottest topic around.
”We are in the midst of a land use regulatory revolution in Washington,” said Richard Settle, a Seattle attorney and author of a book on land use and environmental law that is widely used in the state.
”The suburban masses in western Washington have been radicalized by traffic and by forests being torn down for shopping centers and business parks,” Settle told developers and planners at the Urban Land Institute`s recent spring meeting in Seattle.
Many residents of western Washington`s Puget Sound area have been stunned by rocketing growth over the past decade, especially east of Seattle, where timberlands in a glorious landscape of hills, valleys, lakes and rivers have been bulldozed for new development.
”Politicians were born again and swarmed to the banner of land-use planning and regulation” as a result of public reaction to the growth, Settle said.
”If you want to be a member of the ruling class, you have to learn the revolutionary doctrine,” he told the Urban Land Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based organization of real estate developers, architects, planners, financiers, public officials and others interested in land use issues.
Under pressure from no-growth groups and from Gov. Booth Gardner, who appointed a Growth Strategies Commission, the state legislature passed its first Growth Management Act in 1990. The action, which Settle characterized as a ”Herculean effort and an amazing achievement,” made Washington the ninth state in the nation to pass a strong growth law.
But the act left a number of issues unresolved, and meanwhile citizens`
Initiative 547, which would have replaced the act with much tougher controls on development and, Settle said, would have put significant powers in the hands of environmental groups, was placed on the statewide ballot last November.
That initiative, which at first was a strong favorite in the polls, was ultimatly defeated by a sophisticated, $1.5 million campaign backed by developers, business groups, most Republican and some Democratic politicians and the National Association of Home Builders.
Now the state legislature is back trying to hammer out a new bill that fills the gaps in the 1990 law. The House passed a bill that would make it more comprehensive and enforceable, but action has stalled in the Senate.
The regular legislative session ended last weekend, but a special session to deal with growth management, education and budget issues has been called for mid-June.
Both major Seattle papers, the Times and the Post-Intelligencer, carried lead editorials last weekend blasting a powerful Republican state senator from the less populous eastern section of the state for bottling up the new bill in committee and proposing another version that would be weaker than the 1990 bill.
The senator`s ”stubborn anti-land-use-planning stance is out of step with citizens concerned about growth, with much of the business community, and with lawmakers from both political parties,” said the Times editorial.
Settle noted that the legislative struggle partly reflected strains between the more developed, but more picturesque, western part of the state and the flatter, more economically depressed eastern region.
But, he declared, if the legislative effort to strengthen the law should fail, ”we`ll see another Initiative 547 next fall.”
Before the 1990 legislation, Washington land-use law had been a ”crazy quilt of contradictions,” Settle said. ”The Growth Management Act for the first time imposes substantive requirements.”
The law requires 12 of Washington`s 39 counties, mostly in western Washington, and all of the cities in them, to adopt comprehensive plans and development regulations by specified dates.
It also authorizes other counties to join the process, and altogether about half the state`s counties have done so.
The plans have to be consistent with 13 statewide goals regarding such things as affordable housing, compact development patterns, transit and adequate public facilities.
The law also requires that all counties and cities designate ”natural-resource lands,” namely agricultural, forest and mineral resource lands, and ”critical areas,” which are wetlands. Counties and cities that have become part of the planning process are required to regulate development in those areas.
Such lands make up a significant proportion of the undeveloped lands left in the state, according to a report by Thomas Walsh, an attorney with Settle`s Seattle law firm of Foster Pepper & Shefelman, which has the largest land-use practice in the state.
Draft administrative rules interpreting the law indicate that state intentions are to make wetlands regulation tougher than existing U.S. Army Corps of Engineers standards, Walsh`s report added.
One of the main components of the 1990 law, which would be strengthened by changes now being proposed, is the designation by counties and cities involved of urban growth areas designed as anti-sprawl devices.
The areas will have to be laid out in accordance with population growth for the next 20 years as forecast by the state, and outside the areas any growth that occurs will have to be consistent with farming and forestry.
As a result of this procedure, the state forecasts will in fact determine the extent of new development in each county, according to Walsh.
A second key element is the provision for affordable housing. ”There will have to be housing for all in each community,” Settle said. NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) groups will be constrained in their ability to stop uses they might object to such as low- or middle-income multifamily housing, he added.
The House bill would allow counties and cities to impose impact fees on developers who demolish low-income housing, with the money to be used for new low-income housing. It would also clearly authorize the use of a half-percent tax on home purchases to build, buy or renovate low-income housing.
Affordable housing is becoming an increasingly crucial feature in state land-use planning, which got its original incentive from the inability of local governments to deal with regional traffic problems.
The traffic issue was addressed in the Washington growth act through establishment of a goal to allow development only if highway and mass transit facilities affected by new building are adequate to preserve a certain level of traffic flow.
Provisions such as this, which are a typical feature of state growth laws, are coming to be known as ”concurrency” or ”pay as you grow”
requirements.
In Florida, where the word ”concurrency” was popularized, development can be stopped if it will overcrowd existing highways. That aspect of the law has drawn fire from developers, who claim that its effect is to halt growth rather than shape it.
Settle admitted the Washington law could have a similar effect. ”I`m not sure whether the law is growth management or growth control,” he said.
”There`s no assurance that the necessary public facilities will be built.”
The most important feature of the new House-passed bill is the establishment of a state review of city and county comprehensive plans and development regulations before they are adopted, which is lacking in the 1990 bill.
It would also give the law more teeth by allowing the state to withhold certain tax revenues from fast-growing counties or cities that fail to plan.
A glaring defect of the law that is still to be dealt with, Settle said, is the lack of streamlining of regulatory procedure. Washington`s state environmental regulations are peculiarly cumbersome and time-consuming for developers, he added.
Washington`s rush to manage its growth has come on the heels of an economic boom led by giant companies such as Boeing and Microsoft. They have brought in high-tech workers also attracted by Seattle`s high ratings as one of America`s most livable cities.
This has bought a population surge, especially in the emerald hills between Seattle and the Cascade Mountains, where many high-priced new residential developments have been located.
The population of King County, which includes Seattle east to the Cascades, rose 13.9 percent from 1980 to 1989, but the greatest rate of increase came in eastern areas.
The population of the lushly forested, steeply sloped eastern King County planning area of East Sammamish rose 119 percent, from 12,300 to 26,900, with most of that increase coming since 1985.
”It developed so quickly,” said Linda Stalzer, vice president of Lowe Enterprises Northwest, which is developing Klahanie, an 840-acre, $63 million master-planned community on former timberland in the plateau east of Lake Sammamish. ”In three years the character has changed.”
Klahanie, the only master-planned community in the county, is designed for 3,200 units to be built by 1995, and some 1,300 have been occupied. These include more than 250 subsidized low- and moderate-income single-family homes built at a density of 7.5 to the acre.
The development, which is a 25- to 45-minute commute from Seattle, depending on the traffic, is set in a still partially rural area where cows graze on hillsides. A county no-growth zone is adjacent to one edge of Klahanie, and 1-to-5-acre residential zoning dominates the rest of the surrounding area.
Judith Runstad, a member of the now-disbanded Growth Strategies Commission and the managing partner of Foster Pepper & Shefelman, said that Klahanie and another project became symbols of burgeoning growth in the region, and helped mobilized anti-growth forces whose activities ultimately swung politicians around to support for growth management legislation.
At Klahanie, admitted Stolzer, ”it was easy to see the concentrated growth, so it made people very nervous.”
