What a night!

It’s not very often the audience at a Woodinville City Council meeting applauds long and hard at the end of a meeting. Come to think of it, it’s not very often someone says, “Where’s the party?” after a council meeting. A more common remark might be, “Where’s the aspirin?” But, indeed, applause and party-talk did occur after the Aug. 13 City Council meeting. There were witnesses.

That night, the council voted unanimously to deny the Phoenix Development up-zone requests from one dwelling per acre (R-1) to four dwellings per acre (R-4) for the proposed Wood Trails and Montevallo subdivisions. The council also voted unanimously to deny the Wood Trails and Montevallo preliminary plats, approved earlier this year by Spokane Hearing Examiner Greg Smith, contingent upon council approval of the rezone. Council’s denial of the preliminary plats was an upholding of the appeal filed by Concerned Neighbors of Wellington for reconsideration of Smith’s preliminary plat decision.

So much council unanimity in the span of two hours and 20 minutes for an otherwise split council with a history of interminable council meetings was, well, surprising … if not shocking.

The evening began with City Attorney Greg Rubstello asking Councilman Mike Roskind routine questions about impartiality and Roskind, who missed the Aug. 6 closed-record hearing, answering them for the record, as had the six other council members the week previous.

After receiving some technical information from Development Services Director Hal Hart and 28 minutes into the proceeding, council filed out of Chambers for an Executive Session. In the interim, those 100 or so who were present chatted in small groups or read or, if you can believe it, played gin rummy. Thirty-two minutes later, council returned to Chambers, poker faces affixed.

Council addressed the rezone request for Wood Trails development first. Had the R-4 rezone and the preliminary plat been approved, Wood Trails could have added 66 lots to 38.7 acres in the Western Wellington neighborhood, located on the west side of 156th Avenue Northeast. Nine lots were recommended for transfer to the Montevallo site.

Previous community testimony asserted the Wellington area was plagued with infrastructure challenges that ran the gamut from narrow roads with narrow or no shoulders to blind curves, blind rises and blind driveways to no sidewalks or bike lanes. The community maintained these infrastructure deficiencies could compromise motorist / pedestrian safety, particularly if more drivers were added to the roads. The council gave credence to this argument even though the hearing examiner didn’t.

Council deliberation

Councilmember Roskind cited city code Section 21.04.080(1)(a), “Developments with densities less than R-4 are allowed only if adequate services cannot be provided.”

“The question I ask,” he said, “is are the services available for a rezone for Phoenix Development. It seems sewer is available. The question is what other services are there, and are they available. … We have some challenges within the city to support increasing densities with pressures on our primary services.”

He cited a $42 million shortfall in the city’s six-year transportation plan. He mentioned very choked roads that are increasingly hazardous and difficult to navigate. Other large construction projects within the city are placing pressure on roads.

“The question is are all of the services available to support up-zoning at this time?” asked Roskind. “It’s not clear they can be provided.”

Councilmember Chuck Price cited Chapter 21.28 of the city code and listed services besides sewer that were important to take into consideration before allowing increased density: water supply, surface water management, adequate roads, adequate vehicular access, adequate fire protection, adequate school capacity.

Price said, “All services should be considered. … I believe the hearing examiner didn’t give enough weight to those other services: most specifically, the public safety issues with regard to vehicle and pedestrian traffic and school concurrency as it relates to pedestrian traffic. That is a great concern of mine.”

He also said “Country living, city style” was reflected in the city’s codes and ordinances since incorporation. He thought if R-1 were changed to R-4, it would wash away the city’s embedded plan for “Country living, city style.”

“I think if we take R-1 zoning and make it R-4,” said Price, “it will change the character of those neighborhoods, and character of the neighborhoods is an issue in our planning process. … I do believe there is a great demand for R-1 zoning, and there will be a greater demand in the future for R-1 zoning,” said Price. “If we get rid of it now, it’s gone.”

Deputy Mayor Hank Stecker said, “I guess I was hoping to depend a little bit more heavily on the hearing examiner’s decision, but in looking at some of the points that he brought forward, I’m sorry to say I felt many of them to be cursory in nature. They were brief. They didn’t have the detail that I would have liked. So we’ve had to dig into this quite a bit more.”

He referred to a paragraph of the examiner’s decision that surprised him: “The hearing examiner understands that the four roads which access Wood Trails are not built to city standards, have some sight distance deficiencies and very few sidewalks. The hearing examiner is not convinced, however, that will result in a significant number of accidents or other safety concerns. The people who now drive these roads are obviously careful because the accident reports are minimal. There was no convincing evidence submitted that people living in Wood Trails will drive otherwise.”

“That’s a pretty broad statement,” said Stecker. “I mean, why do we have road standards if everyone drives carefully on bad roads? … One of the reasons we have low accident rates in that area is because … when you have four homes with maybe eight or 12 residents in them on the west side of that blind rise, they are careful. They know each other. They know what to do. When you put 80 homes, 300 some odd people on the other side of that rise, you exacerbate the situation. You cannot depend on all those people to be careful on a road that’s too narrow with blind rises.”

Stecker also noted that the city has done a fine job of providing a mix of housing – apartments, condos, cluster housing, R-1, R-4, etc.

“Surprisingly enough,” he said, “R-1 provides a diversity. We have some very reasonably priced homes as well as some highly priced homes. Without both of those, you don’t have diversity. … We are meeting and exceeding our goals as set forth by the Growth Management Board.”

Stecker referred to the environmental constraints enumerated by the community in previous testimony (landslide hazard areas, severe erosion potential, runoff issues, earthquake faults, for example).

“… It seems like (this development) is being shoehorned in on all corners,” said Stecker. “We’re just pushing the limit on so many different issues up there. … It really doesn’t fall into being appropriate where there are area-wide constraints. And there are. Some of them may be mitigatable, not all of them.”

Councilman Don Brocha, on the council since city incorporation in 1993, said that he and Councilman Scott Hageman, on the council since 1996, and Councilwoman Gina Leonard, on the Planning Commission from 1993 to 2001, understood the intent of the city’s laws and plans since they were around when the city formulated them. He spoke eloquently about the intent of the original Woodinville City Council.

“After we incorporated,” said Brocha, “we produced our first Comprehensive Plan in 1995. In that plan, the Leota-Wellington area was zoned R-1. … The intent of the original Woodinville City Council was to maintain the low-density zoning in that area, which was R-1.

“We also made several other choices that play into this, if you will. We made the choice that we would maintain the existing zoning in 90-95 percent of the city and that we’d let infill development meet the growth targets that were going to be set by the state. … We were also determined to keep commercial and retail in the downtown areas, and we would not expand the neighborhood business center of the White Stallion or the Hollywood intersection.

“This allowed us to … build the infrastructure that was needed in the downtown and at our chokepoints, the same infrastructure that we’re struggling to build today. It would allow us to maintain the neighborhoods as they were and meet the Growth Management Act and the targets. That was the intent of the first city council.

“… In 1996, Corinne Hensley challenged our Comprehensive Plan to the Growth Board. … The result of the challenge was a change to the Comp Plan, and it’s that change that we’re discussing tonight. The Growth Management Hearings Board accepted those changes that we made, and it was those changes that Mr. Hill (attorney for Phoenix Development) has been so insistent that we make our decision on.

“The key question, of course, is what was the city council’s intent of those changes we made (as a result of) the Growth Management Hearings Board decision. Well, our intent was to comply with the Growth Board, obviously. Our intent was to allow R-4 conversions where it made sense. Our intent was not to allow R-4 conversions where it didn’t make sense. Our intent was to continue to acknowledge that we needed to phase certain services, that we couldn’t do it all at once. We were going to stick with working on the core of the city and the traffic chokepoints and move to the rest of the city (with improvements) as our finances could afford it,” said Brocha.

He said the Growth Board accepted the intent of their language. The Growth Board didn’t challenge it.

Councilman Hageman agreed with Brocha. He cited a city land-use policy that called for the preservation of neighborhood character while accommodating Growth Management Act growth forecasts. He said the city went “above and beyond its growth targets.”

As for preserving neighborhood character, Hageman said, “I believe we are doing what we can to support and preserve that with respect to tree canopy and (city work to preserve) the environment.”

He said the city’s ongoing Sustainable Development Study shows its commitment to the environment. Doing what the city could to provide safe roads, walking routes for children and families – those were critical values in the City of Woodinville as well, he said.

Hageman cited another land-use policy having to do with new development complementing existing development patterns. The transition between developments should be seamless. There was a difference between R-1 and R-4. R-4 development, particularly if there is clustering, no longer is complementary to the existing residential development patterns, he said.

He cited a land-use policy that spoke to preserving neighborhood natural environment. He thought the city valued highly preserving neighborhood natural environment.

“Otherwise,” said Hageman, “we would not have made all the effort to maintain R-1 and (pursue) the Sustainable Development Study as we have. … The best way to preserve the natural environment in this area is by maintaining R-1. I believe this rezone flies in the face of preserving this neighborhood’s natural environment.”

Councilwoman Gina Leonard said the Comp Plan was a 20-year plan, and the council, obviously, would need to do some things before it did other things.

Leonard said, in the Comp Plan, “council identified key priorities for planning growth and infrastructure investment. Priorities were also set out in the city’s zoning code, the Capital Improvement Plan and the budget so that near-term and long-term growth proceeds as a coordinated time-efficient and cost-efficient investment process. Council also recognized that the Comp Plan is a 20-year planning horizon and that funding constraints require a need for prioritization of action.

“Council selected the downtown area for its focus for growth and infrastructure investment because it had the greatest need; because the city council could achieve more of the Growth Management Act goals for housing, employment, economic development, transportation improvements (there); and because that is precisely what Vision 2020, the King County countywide planning policies, and the Growth Management Act have told us to do,” said Leonard.

She said this council has made the decision that Woodinville was not yet prepared to commit money to the Wellington area where near-term infrastructure provisions and service expansion are not yet feasible.

Leonard said, “Committing the city to prematurely constructing such facilities and services would become increasingly problematic resulting in an increased inefficiency of services and thereby lessening the economic gain and placing a growing strain on the fiscal resources of the community.

“… The city has a 20-year list of transportation needs and because of the scope, nature, size and the real cost of these needs, and because the sources of funding are limited relative to the cost of improvements, the city purposely focused its investments on major chokeholds in and around the downtown area. New development does create impacts upon public facilities and they are required to pay their fair share of costs for added capacity. (That) does little in the way of correcting existing deficiencies within the context of the city’s plans and the overall capacity of the city.

“… I am not convinced the rezone is appropriate because I do not believe it really advances any legitimate public purpose beyond the ones that we’re working on now, which is to improve deficiency of infrastructure that has gone on much too long, as well as focusing development in the downtown area that will help us to achieve a number of other Growth Management Act goals that we’ve identified as a priority,” said Leonard.

Mayor Cathy VonWald said very little, if anything, about the rezones or developments.

Council votes

Council voted 7-0 to deny the Wood Trails rezone and 7-0 to uphold the Concerned Neighbors of Wellington appeal of the Wood Trails preliminary plat.

As for the rezone and preliminary plat for the Montevallo project that could bring 56 lots to a 16.48-acre parcel in Western Wellington with nine lots transferred from the Wood Trails site, Councilmember Price summed up the discussion by saying, “Ditto for the same reasons (as previously mentioned for the Wood Trails development).”

Council voted 7-0 to deny the rezone for the Montevallo project and 7-0 to uphold the appeal of the Montevallo preliminary plat.

After the applause, smiling audience members shook hands and slapped shoulders in congratulations. It had been a long haul, an expensive three-year endeavor for everyone involved: Phoenix Development, the City of Woodinville, Concerned Neighbors of Wellington and other interested parties.

Phoenix reaction

Phoenix Development’s Attorney G. Richard Hill said in an e-mail: “Here is Phoenix’s reaction: As the Environmental Impact Statement, the Staff Report, and the Hearing Examiner found, the Phoenix rezone requests meet all of the city’s rezone criteria. Phoenix was surprised that the City Council would reject the recommendations of all of its expert consultants and professional staff.

“Phoenix will review the City Council’s final written decision before deciding its next steps,” wrote Hill on behalf of Phoenix Development.