An effort to update Clark County’s buildable lands report hit a bump Tuesday after the county council voted to revisit some of its data and methodology.
Vancouver Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle listed her concerns in a letter sent to the county council prior to the meeting. She said that instead of using recent actual data, which is required by law, the report assumes future residential densities will follow targets established in 2002.
McEnerny-Ogle also said the buildable lands report incorrectly shows no residential development will occur on commercial lands over the next 20 years in Vancouver or elsewhere in the county.
“Neither assumption is supported by development data, or by evidence that such assumptions are consistent with state law or guidance,” McEnerny-Ogle wrote.
Instead, the county should use data provided by city of Vancouver staff to predict future development, she said.
Chad Eiken, the city’s director of community development, was one of several people providing public comment Tuesday and raised some of the same issues.
“Our overriding concern is with the accuracy of the report’s critical growth capacity estimates for the city of Vancouver. It estimates we have capacity for only 3,400 housing units for the next 14 years. But we issued permits for more than half that number of units just last year,” Eiken said. “Plus, we currently have land use and building permit applications under review for three times that number.”
Eiken said there were similar inconsistencies and problems with the population estimates in the report. He said the city raised these concerns with county staff four months ago but, to date, no one from the county has defended the accuracy of the report or provided an explanation.
“The report isn’t required to be completed for another 3½ months. Given its importance in framing future policy actions, we should use the remaining time to get it right,” Eiken said.
Room for growth
Under the state’s Buildable Lands Review and Evaluation Program created in 1997, a component of the Growth Management Act, counties and cities must work together to develop countywide planning policies and create a review and evaluation program for buildable lands.
The primary goal of the review process is to determine whether urban growth areas contain enough buildable land to accommodate future residential, commercial and industrial development.
Although the Growth Management Act applies in most of the state’s counties, the buildable lands process applies only in Clark, King, Kitsap, Pierce, Snohomish, Whatcom and Thurston counties.
The report helps shape planning at the city and county level and must be updated and sent to the state Department of Commerce every eight years. The next report is due June 30, three years prior to the next comprehensive plan update in 2025.
“Some of the major findings in the report deal with the number and types of housing units, housing density and jobs we’ve experienced in the five-year time frame of 2016 to 2020,” said Bob Pool, of the Clark County GIS Department.
Over that time span, there were 21,121 housing units developed in urbanized Clark County and all of the urban growth areas. There were 1,411 housing units added in the rural area.
Vancouver and its unincorporated urban area accounted for 71 percent of the growth, or 14,982 housing units. Ridgefield and Camas had the next-highest growth rates for urban residential development at 11 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Single-family homes accounted for 60 percent of residential housing built in urban Clark County between 2016 and 2020.
Pool said all cities and unincorporated urban Vancouver met their residential density targets in the comprehensive plan. Vancouver had the densest residential development, with 18.3 housing units per acre.
In rural Clark County, the report shows there is capacity for more than 4,800 new housing units, which exceeds the estimated demand through 2035 of 3,102 units.
Chair Karen Bowerman said her understanding was that additional work was supposed to be done to verify the data used in the report but that had not yet happened. She said there seems to be “a real disconnect between what is in the report and what is reported” to the county by staff from the city of Vancouver and the Columbia River Economic Development Council.
“We still have up to a third of our workforce that leaves the county in order to have gainful employment,” Bowerman said, adding that’s something the county can address through available lands.
The council decided to send the report back to county staff to review and rework. The council will review the reworked report during its 10 a.m. meeting on March 1. For an agenda or link to the meeting, go to https://clark.wa.gov/calendar.
