Once again Herald reporter Noah Haglund exposes poor county practices in the Dec. 20 “Slippery slope” exposé. At core is the Snohomish County planning department’s irresponsible policy of automatically vesting all development applications that cross its desk. State vesting law was designed to provide predictability to the builders and provides a 20-day window for county reviewers to accept or reject a proposal. If no decision is made, the application becomes automatically vested. The public has only 21 days to appeal a flawed project, if only it knew about it. The trouble is that at this point there is no public notice to alert anyone that there is even anything occurring in the county coffers, until after another 120-day process. Then people finally get signs and notices that grant them limited say over some environmental issues, often too late to remedy other illegal aspects of the project, from grading and drainage violations, or zoning and title transgressions, or lack of water supply to general mayhem that often goes on illegally to hone the site.
The county’s egregious failure to provide initial application review has littered our landscape with many illegal and ill-conceived development schemes. The consequences have only begun to haunt us all, Oso being just one spectacular debacle. We see in the exposé, how it will affect a major industry, but even the railroad behemoth, BNSF, may be powerless to do anything about a landslide-inducing project with significant impacts to the shoreline and rail transport. The courts could do their job under the State Environmental Policy Act, but per the article seem disinclined to.
We can only hope new management of the planning department under Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers will put an end to the despicable practice of automatic vesting of bad projects by county planning directors.
Laura Hartman
Snohomish
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