Submitted by Claudia Riiff Finseth.
At their public meeting on November 15, the Parkland-Spanaway-Midland Land Use Advisory Commission voted unanimously to recommend to the Hearing Examiner to deny the placement of the county executive’s priority project tiny home village on the Spanaway Wetlands.
They ultimately felt, as the greater community feels, that high density development on an important wetland is a land use mistake, and violates the Parkland-Spanaway-Midland Communities Plan.
I would like to take a minute to speak to process.
In a public meeting that was long on staff presentation of the project and way too short on community comments time, it became clear that the county is trying to take up the majority of meeting time.
This also happened at the County Council meeting of March 25 of this year. By the time the Council opened the meeting to public comment, they had to cut the time each community member could have the microphone from 3 minutes to 90 seconds.
3 minutes is already a very short time. 90 seconds is impossible.
Last night at the LUAC meeting, the county staff took the first forty-five minutes to yet again go through the proposed project in unnecessary detail. Then the Tacoma Rescue Mission was given the floor to basically do it all over again.
TRM’s executive director, Duke Paulson, took the opportunity to preach to the community (before we even had a chance to speak!) about the needs of the chronically homeless, when in all our on-line comments we were objecting specifically to the inappropriateness of using the Spanaway Marsh for any high density purpose. For the community it is a land use issue, period. And the fact that the zoning of the Marsh had to be changed to allow TRM’s project is proof of that.
At the LUAC meeting time again ran out. The first few community speakers were given the standard 3 minutes. With time running short to use the Sprinker facility, the LUAC then cut the time to 2 minutes each. Finally, in the end, about half of the people who wanted to speak simply did not have their chance to do so.
Over and over again on this Executive Priority project, the rights of the people who live in this community or care about the Chambers-Clover Creek Watershed to be heard have been grossly curtailed.
This is wrong. It has to stop.
The County Council, the Land Use Advisory Commissions, and the County Parks Department have all been at fault, and need to review their use of public meeting time and space. The Parks Department should be ashamed of itself for cutting short an important county hearing. That should never happen again.
In addition, if the County (whether in the form of the Council or the LUACs) wants to limit the length of public meetings, then they must limit the proportion of time for staff presentations and project presentations to ensure the community has an equivalent and appropriate share of the time. County staff does not run these meetings: the chairperson does. I lay it squarely on the chairpersons to be more equitable with time.
The Hearing Examiner needs to make note of this. A greater priority must be given to the public hearing chance for community comment when that hearing convenes.
You could compare it to gathering Public input on the development of the Chambers Bay Golf Course. The Chambers Bay Park is a gem and heavily used by the public as a much needed recreational space with coveted beach access. It is highly valued by the taxpayers who fund it. Golf Villas in the Park? Not so much. And yet that public process also came to a different conclusion.
Thank you for sharing that story, Cynthia. It is hopeful!
What you have described is the modus operandi of Pierce County’s autocratic Executive and his enablers.
Yes, Don, there does really seem to be more attempts to impose things on Parkland-Spanaway-Midland than to work with the community who lives here.
Although I no longer live Washington I have read with interest about Claudia Finseth’s efforts to protect the Spanaway marsh lands.
In the early 1980’s my neighbor and I teamed up to stop the building of an asphalt batching plant on the land that had been used to mine sand and gravel on what is now Chambers Bay Golf course.
We were able to get the community involved as well as a few local politicians and one County Council member, Joe Storting. We requested another hearing board meeting at a local site in University Place packed with citizens and an attorney who volunteered to help us with the presentation.
We won…as Cynthia Endicott pointed out look at what we have on the west side of University Place now …wonderful multi use park, golf course, restaurant, walking paths etc
Claudia you are doing a wonderful job alerting the community about what is at stake!
I applaud your efforts!
Mary Rance
Thank you, Mary. I deeply appreciate your support. But I can’t take credit for all of it. I am part of a much larger community that cares deeply about the Chambers-Clover Creek Watershed.
Follow the money.
I too no longer live in Washington but I still love Lakewood and while I miss it I am grateful to be here in Texas now. When will Washington voters wake up? What will it take?
Not only sprawl but good safe pure drinking water is what is also at stake here. Don’t take the purist water in the country for granted but instead protect it and preserve it.
0 debt got it right, “follow the money” !
Thank you, Joan. One community member who testified said he felt the Parkland-Spanaway-Midland area was always being dumped on by the county. More and more of us feel that way. It’s really sad. But do we get real amenities, like the swimming pool we have needed for more than a half-century? No. That is always kicked down the road by our elected officials, even the ones who represent our area.
One must wonder just WHAT is the driving motivation?
Systematized government corruption can as easily follow from careless indifference to process as from ill intent. Peeling beneath he layers of apparent community generosity implicit, one begins to smell something dead in the water. I don’t get this project as having anything sensible about it. But if appearance is all we care about, it’s a masterpiece.
Yes, Bob. It was very telling to hear the testimony of one formerly homeless man at the LUAC meeting. He said he would never want to live on this project, that it was more like a prison for the chronically homeless than anything.
Claudia, thanks for a well written article. I was at the meeting and would like to insert my thoughts. Rob Jenkins from the county did what any monkey could do. He had a power point presentation and read each slide word for word. He was NOT well prepared and couldn’t answer any questions that the LUAC had for him. I was very impressed by the Land Use Commission however. Considering they’re all volunteers and were given a huge stack of paperwork to go through 3 days before the meeting, from the county (you don’t think that was intentional, do you?), they put their lives on hold to go through all that paperwork and they had some really great questions and comments. For instance, “was there an environmental impact study done”? The reply was that it wasn’t required. WHAT????? The last time one was done for that area was over 20 years ago. With the wetlands, Coffee Creek and Spanaway Marsh all in that area, why wasn’t one done? We did a short plat several years ago. We’re about 1 1/2 blocks from there, but well above the level of the lake and Coffee Creek, yet we had to jump through a lot of hoops and lots of requirements, costing thousands of dollars for something that the county told us would be a “slam dunk”.
I have respect for the Tacoma Rescue Mission and I’m sure their heart is in the right place, but this is a poor location on so many levels. I feel bad that more people weren’t able to speak. I do want to commend the LUAC members for a job well done.