Tonight is another SMP meeting with emphasis on building heights.
Tomorrow night’s comprehensive plan update meeting appears to be a briefing on the latest progress of the public involvement associated with the initial draft of the Comprehensive Plan Update. (Can you believe it’s this close to being released?)
The agenda is here.
The staff report is here.
The staff is seeking feedback on their ideas on the review process of the Comprehensive Plan itself and the Action/Implementation Plan which will serve as our guide to Elysium (the Greek word for a Comprehensive Plan that has been accomplished). I’ll leave this one by clipping the meat of the staff report:
Staff is working closely with consultant Jason Robertson, J Robertson and Company, to design public involvement opportunities that engage a diverse cross-section of the Olympia community, and result in valuable and constructive feedback on the proposed Plan updates.
The details of this process are still being determined, but in general it is likely to include two public forums with opportunities for community members to review the updates and engage in in-depth discussions with the team of staff writers. Staff would also like to introduce an Action Plan framework to affirm for the community that their ideas for implementing the Comprehensive Plan were heard and will form the basis for developing the content of the Action Plan in 2013.
***Update***
See the staff briefing paper about the substantive public involvement sections of the comprehensive plan which was presented last fall. The policy proposals in this document may be applied tonight, but the meeting itself is about the process of public involvement in the draft release, not the substance of public involvement in those sections of the comprehensive plan.
The February 6, 2012 Regular Planning Commission Meeting featured a discussion on the Shoreline Modification (docks, moorages, dredging, etc) Chapter of the SMP and a brief presentation of heights and views. I’ll discuss both in turn after I describe what I considered was the most mind-boggling occurrence—the discussion of the schedule for the OPC’s completion of the SMP.
In an effort to complete OPC review prior to the termination of the commission terms on March 31, 2012 (through which there will be a turnover of at least three commissioners who did not re-apply), the commission leadership proposed eight additional meetings for February and March. There are certainly reasons to undertake that kind of schedule, but as I said last night, commissioner turnover needs to be weighed against the extreme likelihood of absences due to previous commitments and the likelihood of falling short of the March 31, deadline despite our best efforts. Some commissioners argued that the Council is champing at the bit to get the SMP. While I imagine it’s possible that some councilmembers have said so privately, the most recent staff report to Council left no official pronouncement and without that, I’d call this concern irrelevant speculation. Commissioners stressed the need of additional staff time in order to meet the demanding schedule, but the response was staff reports from a Monday meeting cannot be prepared by a following Wednesday meeting even in the best of times. Staff resources are also currently tied up with drafting the Comprehensive Plan Update, leaving them less time than usual. We’ve also left most of the extremely controversial issues—heights and views, and the Parking Lot—to the end. As one commissioner astutely pointed out, the Parking Lot, a group of issues that were deemed too confusing, too consequential, too dependent on other decisions, and simply those issues we didn’t to take on when they came up, is still out there and it will take loads of time to sort through. Given our inability to meet any deadlines at all up to this point it simply beggars belief that we would be able to do so now with these shortcomings. Finally, and most importantly, if we cannot meet this schedule by even one meeting because there aren’t enough Mondays and Wednesdays in March, we’ll have at least three new commissioners who will be responsible for voting on the entire package without much of a clue about what they are voting on. Ironically, while we collectively convinced ourselves of the need to hurry, except for the personal desire that the departing commissioners had to complete this during their terms, I didn’t hear another argument in favor of an expedited schedule. As we left it last night, if we cannot complete the SMP on this new timeframe, we’ll defeat the purpose of a condensed schedule anyway and will waste up to 24 hours (assuming that meetings do not exceed three hours) of meeting time and staff hours. Our collective response was: “we should try.” Thus, Fonzie sailed over the shark.
Ironically, the alternative proposal which stretched out the SMP meetings to July was actually realistic and I thought desirable. Not only did it allow plenty of time for deliberating the controversial issues, it also allowed much more time for new commissioner learning curves. Indeed, it would have taken the SMP several months but at least it took into account our track record and the pile of work on the commission desk which I believe are the only relevant data points in the analysis.
Next, the commission jumped into the Shoreline Modification chapter where one commissioner illustrated perfectly the problem with this SMP deliberation. The issue of docks on waterfront residential properties is contentious because it congeals within itself collective and individual rights. Thanks to the commissioner who brought it up for discussion, the commission actually had an illuminated discussion on what it means to restrict the permitting of single family docks, what the proliferation of docks means for marine and freshwater ecology, and what options the commission has in dealing with these issues. Naturally, we shelved the issue for subsequent consideration.
This moment of our deliberation reminded me of one of my previous comments to the commission more than a year ago: I suggested the commission formulate a list of broad issues just like the use of docks that is well within our discretion and our competency. I suggested that we discuss and vote on these issues not as SMP legal or ecological experts, but as community members on a citizen advisory committee. I believe that had we done this, we would have had perhaps up to a hundred issues (but I bet less) of which some would have taken some time to digest. We could have offered minority reports where we disagreed. Finally, we could have relied on staff to embed those decisions into the draft, reviewed that draft on our own time, and asked questions on our areas of concern. This would have taken time, but I doubt it would have taken nearly as much time as it did. Most importantly, the OPC would have given the City Council a draft program that would be much more complete and much more reflective of the community’s desire than what they’re going to receive from the OPC. Instead, we have spent the last 12 months doing glorified copy editing not because we decided that it the best thing to do, but because as a group, we didn’t know what else to do but turn the pages of the SMP draft one at a time with the chair reading off section numbers and asking for comments.
Finally, last night the commission took in a presentation of sight lines mentioned in the previous post. There were ominous comments at the conclusion of that discussion which led me to believe we have under-scheduled (perhaps severely) the time that will be necessary to complete our discussion of heights and views. Please review the second paragraph of this post.
Tonight at 6:30 pm, in Room 207 of City Hall, the OPC will continue its discussion of the Shoreline Master Program. The agenda is here.
We left off the discussion of heights and views last time after attempting to determine which “site-lines” the commission believes are worthy of special attention in the context of general heights and views policy formulation. The staff report explains that these viewsheds are: 1.) west from Rotary Park to Mt. Rainier; 2.) From East Bay to the Capitol; and, 3.) from Olympia/Plum Streets northward to edge of the Port Peninsula in order to see the Olympics.
The commission had several options for dealing with heights and views and chose this one. The OPC will have a much broader grant of authority to deal with them under the Comprehensive Plan Update process. It will be very interesting to observe whether the approaches to views and heights now will be useful later on.
The pressure is on to complete the SMP before the current commission term ends if for no other reason than to avoid another relatively steep learning curve for new commissioners. The counterargument to rushing to the finish line is that a new city council should have a free hand in formulating community policies every step of the way. Given the work that still remains to be completed and the few slots still available for properly noticed meetings, I’m skeptical about finishing the SMP before the end of March anyway.
Tonight, we welcome back a favorite discussion to the Olympia Planning Commission’s deliberation of the Shoreline Master Program draft: height limitation and view protection.
If the OPC is sincerely attempting to approach heights and views, our discussion will be deeply embedded in the context of both our collective rights and individual rights. Personally, I love issues that require this contextual apparatus—perhaps not in a citizen advisory committee—but I do love thinking about this construct. By collective I mean the rights that we all share in common, as a group, or at the very least the rights that one individual within that group cannot appropriate to her individual benefit. An individual right of course is the converse: a right that someone holds individually and has the power to do with as he pleases.
Heights and views are a perfect example of the intersection of these rights. From the perspective of individual rights, a private property owner can do whatever she wants with her land. On the other hand, the actions of that individual on that land have collective implications, and sometime those implications may impact the rights we share in common. (I know that some people don’t like the word collective. May the Cold War rest in peace.) What about the converse? Do our collective rights ever impact the individuals which comprise the group? Perhaps someday we’ll consult Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacque Rousseau, John Locke, Publius Valerius Publicola, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx (May the Cold War rest in peace), Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim on that extremely complicated but most enlightening and ultimately beautiful question.
The long and short of it is we have organized ourselves over the last millennium in such a way that we try to maintain individual rights, but we understand that those individual rights are subject to the actions we take as groups, and most importantly it’s not going to work perfectly to make everyone happy. In theory, they work together to ensure the greatest potential human freedom. That’s essentially the argument for government, from the constitution to your neighborhood association bylaws. Our collective rights usually maintain the kind of language you hear in the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address (“For the people.” not “for the individual.”), and the Consitution (“We the People” not “I the individual”). The basic idea is that we understand that without some kind of basic rights, guarantees, and rules on a collective scale, we cannot ensure that any single individual can maintain those rights beyond her ability to enforce that with the means at her disposal at any given time. The fellow down the street with the private army could do whatever he wants until someone else comes along with a bigger private army. In our less than infinite wisdom we have progressed at least to the extent that we understand it is not desirable to appeal to force in order to create a desirable society. (Although in many sociological designations, warring clans are every bit as much a feature of modern society as they were in the days of marauding Danes.)
These ideas are embedded in us as residents of the United States and more particularly, as Olympians. They are there regardless of whether we acknowledge them. When Olympians discuss views and height limits, or any land use decision, they are actually discussing the application of these issues to the piece of dirt in question.
That is how I see it anyway. Some, perhaps most, disagree with me. There is a very powerful current of thinking that individual ownership, particularly in land, is the right to exclude others from it entirely. Thus, if someone wants to build a 25 story building in front of the Capitol, it should be their right to do so subject only to the constraints that the market (i.e. the desire and ability of people to rent the apartments or offices in it).
Removing the intermediary steps in this analysis which would probably only bore you anyway, the real question becomes is a view a collective right? If so, what are the limits to those rights? Which laws ensure those rights? Does someone have a right to see the Capitol or anything else an individual might personally treasure from any point in Olympia? Should some areas be protected because they are exceptional views? Is there a right here to a view at all? See how complicated this gets?
If there are rights to a view, what options are available to ensure them? Obviously, we can collectively tell landowners that certain buildings are not allowed in certain places. We can tell landowners that by our collective will, some of their rights to their private property do not exist.
Does it seem odd, unfair, or at least a little unsettling, that your individual rights to your land could be deprived entirely by a collective will with which you may vehemently disagree? It’s more common than you think, and it doesn’t happen just with land. A few quick examples: we don’t allow smoking in public bars (not to mention drinking alcohol in public); in Olympia we actually have a law—enforced by jail time not just fines—that prohibits people from sitting or standing in the middle of sidewalk in downtown if someone else thinks they might have to walk around you; we’re evidently about to tell downtown businesses, that they cannot sell certain types of alcohol; we’ve already decided that starting in 2013, most fireworks aren’t allowed in the city limits; we amended the Constitution a hundred years ago to prohibit consumption of alcohol; throughout our history, our collective will deprived basic human rights from the majority of our own population; (What percentage of the human population had any right to participate—via voting—in the collective decisionmaking process in 1850? Not even close to a majority.) And of course, collectively, we order people to die and carry out that sentence on a regular basis.
The issue of collective and individual rights as regards to heights and views is perhaps more straightforward if not much more pleasant to consider (if you’re not a landowner subject to them). Tonight the Olympia Planning Commission will consider our general policies about how to deal with heights and views in the SMP jurisdiction. What about the heights and views outside the SMP jurisdiction? That will come with the Comprehensive Plan update which is already in progress and will see much more light over the next year.
The Agenda is here. The staff report mentions a briefing paper which can be found here. This was used in the Summer 2010 SMP subcommittee briefings on the SMP topics. (The staff report says that this was attached to the December 19, 2012 meeting, but I was able to find only an excerpt of it there. Through some impressive search engineering, I was able to find despite its banishment to the nether reaches. Pauses. Pats self on back.)
As you’ve no doubt heard by now if you’re interested in this kind of thing, the city will present its update on Sea Level Rise to the community tonight at 7:00 pm in the Olympia Center (Room B).
The meat of the update appears to be this technical report.
As you may have noticed, the planning commission meeting was cancelled last week due to weather while this week’s meeting was rescheduled so the planning commission could attend the Sea Level Rise presentation. I’ll be there at least for a little while in the hopes that information not in the report might be presented.
The Special Meeting (special because it was a Regular meeting for purposes of advisory committee notice) on January 11, 2012 had change in which I can believe and more of the same. The latter was congealed a two hour slog about minor points over chapter 5 of the SMP draft. The subcommittee had done this during their meetings but some of it was removed from the “consent” calendar because evidently there was disagreement about in Monday. In any case, the language in that chapter for the most part has been vetted by the OPC and may actually become part of the SMP. So much for more of the same.
As for change in which I can believe, the OPC took on a commendable process of heights and view limitations for purpose of the SMP update. As some of you may be aware, this is a contentious issue in Olympia and the OPC decided first to establish working policies about heights and views before allowing their thinking to be caged into regulations provided by the staff. This takes more time now, but if we don’t do this correctly we won’t save any in the long run anyway. There is nothing the OPC is better equipped to do than provide policy recommendations that are representative of the community. (If you ask me, they shouldn’t be doing anything else.) While some may disagree with me, I think the divergence of views on our commission will represent the community well in our deliberation over this issue. Naturally, we have received voluminous public comment over the last couple of years about this heights and views so we should be well prepared.
The single public comment last night expressed dismay over the application process for the 2012 year in the OPC. This year, just like last year, nine of the 11 terms have come up for reappointment. In contrast to last year when the council simply allowed the commissioners who wanted to continue their terms to do so, this year those who want to serve another term are required to reapply and interview with the General Government Committee of the City Council. Once the commission has been selected, the terms will be staggered so that this problem does not arise again soon. If the there are to be nine new members, it might throw a wrench in the 2012 work plan. Point well taken.
