WOODLAND — After another four-plus-hour meeting, Woodland’s planning commission is starting to make some recommendations about changes to the city’s comprehensive plan map.
Thursday night’s meeting was the second straight to hit the four-hour mark, as the commission started looking on a case-by-case basis at the eight applicants who requested zoning changes to the city’s comprehensive plan map. The commissioners are reviewing all applications and making recommendations to city council on whether or not to approve the request.
Of the four applicants the commission looked at Thursday night, the commissioners recommended city council approve three requests, and postponed deciding on the fourth project until March 21, since the site owner wasn’t present to answer questions. The three projects they recommended for approval were:
• Changing .5 acres of Old Pacific Highway from residential to industrial.
• Changing approximately 6.37 acres south of 1986 Atlantic Ave. between Atlantic and Cherry Blossom Street from commercial to residential.
• Changing roughly 5.51 acres on Sandalwood Road from commercial to residential.
The fourth request is to change about 21.51 acres on Franklin Loop from commercial to residential.
“We’re just now talking about the individual cases and how our vision is going to flesh out,” Travis Goddard, Woodland’s community development director. “Ultimately, each of these cases is going to be gathered up into one map. The city council will decide on one new map.”
Woodland is facing expected growth and a lack of residential land, Goddard said at a meeting in December. According to projections from the city, by 2036 Woodland is expected to grow by another 3,400 residents and add another 1,300 homes. Currently, the city has a population of about 6,100 with roughly 2,200 homes.
Before the commission started looking at each request, Goddard made a presentation about recent and future development in the city. He said there have been 129 dwellings built in the city since 2016, just eight of which are multi-family units. That leaves the city with 1,155 units to be built in the next 20 years to reach the 1,292 units the city anticipated needing in its 2016 comprehensive plan.
According to Goddard’s presentation, the city has 76.24 acres of developable commercial land remaining, and 398.65 acres of developable industrial land remaining. The city had about 174 acres of residential development land as of the 2016 comprehensive plan. Goddard said he doesn’t like to use acreage to look at residential development land because of the various densities that can be used when developing residential land. That residential land could be developed for another 345 units, according to Goddard’s estimation.
That’s where the need for the more residential zoning comes in. However, Goddard said the city’s commercial base is growing, and the planning commission and city council will have to think about if it makes sense to get rid of commercial land.
The requests expected to be discussed at the March meeting could bring in more than 670 acres of residential land to the city, most of which would come from expanding the city’s urban growth boundary. The biggest project is from Aho Construction, which asked for a 605.5-acre expansion of Woodland’s urban growth boundary south of the city between the railroad tracks and the Lewis River.
Ultimately, the planning commission will put all their decisions into one map to present to the city council. They are looking at six growth plans:
• No growth or changes at all.
• Internal growth, where all growth will be accommodated through comprehensive plan designation changes for land already within the city limits.
• Partial applicant accommodation, where the city could choose to add some of the land requested into its urban growth boundary.
• Full applicant accommodation, where all applications are included in the urban growth boundary.
• City proposed boundary expansion, where the city will look at urban growth area expansion using “logical and practical approaches to eliminate boundary peculiarities,” according to information from the city.
• Woodland Bottoms planning, where the city will look at the practical implication of growth within the bottomlands, including planning for growth impacts that occur in Cowlitz County.
