Council steps toward new building regs

l New design guidelines, process get an early OK

By Jim Hills

Enterprise publisher

EDMONDS

It may be the beginning of the end to a regulatory saga that started 14 years ago.

It may also be the beginning of the end the to a lawsuit that started just months ago.

City Council members on Tuesday gave their unanimous, but provisional, OK to new design guidelines and a new way to review projects under those guidelines. A final ordinance could be adopted as soon as the April 3 council meeting.

The new guidelines and process would apply only to the city’s downtown and Highway 99 areas, but city planner Rob Chave said the model would eventually be used for all of Edmonds. “We do this until at some point we’re all doing the new process and then jettison the old process,” Chave told the council.

For an issue that began in 1993 with a state Supreme Court case involving Issaquah’s regulations that ruled unconstitutional “vague” design and planning language, Tuesday’s hearing drew little attention and testimony. Two regular council-watchers, Roger Hertrich and Finis Tupper, testified against the review process part of proposal, as did several developers, including Rob Michel, a former member of the city’s Architectural Design Board (ADB), a panel that is key in applying the law. Testifying in support of the proposal was Bob Gregg, who is suing the city over a ruling made under the current guidelines and process. There was no comment on the proposed design guidelines, themselves.

Guidelines

“I’m heartened to see there is no quibbling about the design guidelines, just the process,” Councilman Richard Marin said at the meeting.

The design guidelines provisionally approved by the council run to more than 20 pages of regulations. The new ordinance would basically do away with most of the language in the previous code in favor of neighborhood specific criteria, crafted through a series of public meetings.

What the new guidelines don’t have are some of the specific words that the state Supreme Court used in 1993 as examples of vagueness, Gregg said. “Long, boring and monotonous,” is not in there,” he said. Those words are in the current guidelines and were used in a recent appeal of Gregg’s first application to renovate the Old Milltown building. Gregg responded by suing the city and the residents who brought the appeal. Before Tuesday’s meeting, Gregg presented the council with a letter from attorney Dennis Reynolds, who was involved in the 1993 Issaquah case, with comments generally supporting the guidelines and new process.

City attorney Scott Snyder said the new guidelines are designed to be used in the new process to build a very specific list of items that an applicant would be asked to address. “What we’re trying to do is take out any implication that a design’s approval or denial is based on feelings,” Snyder said.

Process

They call it “upfront” and the new process provisionally approved by the council turns the current procedure on its head.

City planner Chave presented the council with two diagrams comparing the processes. The new plan would have the ADB involved as an applicant’s first formal interaction with the city. Chave said a two-part public hearing would be used. The first part would require some general drawings and descriptions from an applicant and would generate the design review checklist. In the second phase of the hearing, the applicant would come back with more details and address the checklist items. At this point, according too the diagrams, the public would have an opportunity to appeal an ADB decision to the city council. If no appeal were filed, a project would then move on to apply for permits and go through the normal city staff process.

“You don’t get to appeal to the ADB at the end of this?” Councilman Michael Plunkett asked.

Snyder reminded the council that permit review and approval would be based on how well the applicant addressed the items raised in the public hearing before coming to staff, not subjective judgments on the final plan.

Councilwoman Deanna Dawson remained concerned about a lack of opportunity for public input after final details were in place. Chave said staff now takes comments on plans under permit review and would continue to do so under the new process. He offered that the process could include some notification to interested parties as well as making electronic renderings of plans available on the city’s Web site or e-mailed to those who sign up.

Developer and former ADB member Michel said, “We’re close on things. I’ve been on the ADB seven years and we’ve been working on this seven years. But, staff needs to work with the development community.”

Michel said he felt there was a disconnect between the diagram and the wording of the proposal. “The drawing tells me what to do, but it doesn’t tell me in words what to do,” he said. Michel also raised concerns about a process that didn’t appear to have the flexibility to accommodate projects that might not need such an involved, and potentially lengthy, review.