Lake Whatcom Watershed Development Restrictions to Be Lifted

I can't think of anything more important to our community's resilience than having access to clean (and affordable) drinking water. Peak Oil is nothing in the face of Peak Water. However, I don't see any TW groups yet addressing this issue.

Lake Whatcom is the drinking water source for 80,000 people. There have been many people concerned about this issue for a long time, and there have been numerous and time consuming and expensive studies done. There have also been many efforts toward actions that protect and preserve the water quality coming out of the lake. But it's always seemed like too little, too late.

The forces moving in the wrong direction on Lake Whatcom are now stronger than they have been in quite a while.

Tim Johnson in the last two issues of Cascadia Weekly has laid it out very well.

EVERYTHING NEW IS OLD AGAIN by Tim Johnson, The Gristle (Cascadia Weekly), June 1, 2010: In February, Whatcom County Council renewed its temporary ban on the subdivision of lots in the Lake Whatcom watershed to parcels smaller than five acres. When they agreed to extend the ban for the umpteenth time in 2009, it was with the understanding that the county’s work on urban growth areas and rural land use would be largely completed and their decisions on the fate of these lands might be made permanent. But with new council majorities comes old land use ideas, and a harried council indicated in February they wanted to give the subdivision matter more attention later in the spring.

The recommendation of planning commissioners and staff (as well as the City of Bellingham and numerous and diverse advocates of lake protection) to County Council has been that they should make the subdivision ban permanent.

A point about that: The owners of these lands can still build single homes on lots larger than five acres; they simply cannot carve their parcels down into smaller lots and flip them to development interests for a quick profit. This struck a particular faction of the council—most vocally among its newest and least experienced members—as sacrilege to property rights even though the rights of these property owners to use and profit from their lands as they currently exist has not been infringed or reduced. County taxpayers must compensate these property owners for their phantom profits, this faction avers; the unspoken portion of their syllogism is that since the county has no revenues to provide such compensation, not only should the ban not be extended, it should be lifted.

Council on May 25 failed to make the ban on subdivisions in the watershed permanent.

"My understanding is that next week we will try again to pass the permanent ordinance, and if it fails to get the votes the temporary moratorium will still be in place until the end of August," Council member Carl Weimer explained. "To my knowledge no one has floated the idea of repealing the temporary moratorium immediately, although nothing would surprise me at this point."

"We’ve looked at this, and there’s not a lot the city can do" to prevent a lifting of the ban, Bellingham Mayor Dan Pike admitted. Since allowing a temporary ordinance to lapse is not subject to veto, there’s not much the County Executive can do, either. When administrations can’t act, citizen involvement becomes critical.

At the time the moratorium was first proposed in 2001, procedural errors created a narrow opening through which property owners were able to file hundreds of development applications with the county planning department. If past is prologue, if the moratorium expires there’ll be another stampede and dozens of additional development applications again flooding the planning department. And while estimates are that fewer than 200 additional homesites might be advanced in this new wave, what’s worse is they may be built using the obsolete development standards that existed before this whole debacle began...

EIGHT-BALL ENGINEERING by Tim Johnson, The Gristle (Cascadia Weekly), June 8, 2010: Whatcom County prepares to throw wide the doors for development around Lake Whatcom while simultaneously crippling the revenues that might fund even meager efforts to protect your drinking water resource.

Surprising no one, for the second time in as many weeks Whatcom County Council failed to make the ban on new subdivisions in the Lake Whatcom watershed permanent, a move that would prevent the construction of hundreds of additional homes in this drinking water resource for 80,000 people. The clock runs out on the ban in August.

As we’ve detailed, should that happen, landowners may stampede the county planning office, filing dozens of applications to subdivide their property into additional home sites. As we also detailed, no additional legal clarity will arrive by August on the rules by which these homes might be built.

Do land use rules in place when these properties were first purchased apply; or do the more stringent modern rules in place when development applications are filed apply? The latter would better safeguard human health; the former greatly assists property speculation and profiteering. Guess which concern—ignoring a century of court rulings declaring the contrary—the mighty new County Council majority favors?

"Whatcom County seems to be the the only county in the state of Washington having this conversation in 2010," county Planning Supervisor Tyler Schroeder observed—particularly about lands bordering a municipal water supply!

Nevertheless, Schroeder said, based on an unchallenged Hearings Examiner ruling, the county will approach these decisions on a case-by-case basis—the very opposite of predictability and transparency: Land use "decisions" with all the planning authority of a Magic 8 Ball: "It is decidedly so." "Ask again later." "Signs point to yes." The county planning director also got the blackball treatment. For David Stalheim, it was swallow this poison pill or be fired. He quit...

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Permalink Reply by David MacLeod on June 11, 2010 at 8:13pm

Thank you for the reply Prahbupad.

OK, so we have the idea for leafleting.
There's also letters to the editor, showing up at County Council meetings and speaking during the "open mic" time, as well as contacting Council members directly and letting them know that you want to see strong action taken to protect our drinking water.

I'm sure many more creative ideas can be brought forth.

There is one volunteer organizations in the community that could use support in numerous ways.
One is People for Lake Whatcom
http://www.peopleforlakewhatcom.org/

There's also an older website with good info on past work:
http://www.lakewhatcom.org

And there's a Silver Beach blog that has articles on watershed related issues:
http://silverbeachbeat.blogspot.com/

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Permalink Reply by Heather K on July 3, 2010 at 7:14pm

Thankfully Lake Whatcom is the drinking source of water for so many urban citizens!
Without this lake source of their drinking water, the purity of the waters and the speed of development would be much worse.
I'll be much more convinced of the citizens & government's words of protecting the lake waters, when they stop putting their gas-powered boats on the lake.