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Growth Decisions Costing Jobs and Investments While Creating Sprawl by Jack Petree; Bellingham Herald, 8/12/2010

If you are reading this, your environment, your economic prospects, your choice of housing, your community and your future quality of life were significantly degraded last year when the previous Whatcom County Council passed a new comprehensive plan regulating future land use in the county.

More is on the way.

Need a job?
Last year's plan shattered the concept of regulatory consistency jobs-producing business depends on.
Sprawl? For the first time, we have mandated sprawl into the non-urban growth area portions of the county, assigning growth projections to our agricultural, forest, mineral and rural lands and dramatically constricting supply in our cities.
Environment? We deliberately planned to become a commuter county with all that means for our future environment and quality of life.

The plan cements in place a sea-change regarding how growth takes place in WhatcomCounty, where growth will take place in the county's future and, especially, in how much incentive businesswomen and men have to support our WhatcomCounty economy and the jobs we depend on that economy to create.

Consider:
Hearings Boards have found inclusion in an urban growth area carries with it a "certainty" that growth can take place within a 20-year timeframe. We just stripped 5,000 acres of that certainty - costing investors millions. Given that, why would one businessperson spend one nickel on jobs production when it all can be arbitrarily taken away next year? Maybe that is why the Department of Commerce told some of our decision-makers last year the department no longer recommends WhatcomCounty when asked about locational decisions. The actions taken in recent years and affirmed last year also dramatically restricted land supply for our future housing needs, especially in Bellingham. We all pay for that.

Just one cost comes from the fact that we are building subsidized apartments in Bellingham at a cost of $250,000-plus per apartment while private enterprise is selling four and five bedroom homes in outlying areas for less than $200,000 per home. Guess who gets to pay for that subsidized housing? Guess where new people who don't want to raise a family on the fourth floor will choose to live? Guess how many pounds of greenhouse gas emissions are pumped into the atmosphere in a 15-mile-per-day, each way, commute to the part time jobs our economy is, and will continue to be, based on?

The agenda cemented into place last year had effectively been in place and controlling our growth for the past decade. During that time we have proven the approach creates far more sprawl than we have ever seen before, discourages jobs production, reduces sustainability and lessens diversity in the community. Our decision-makers have rather deliberately said, "We're good with that." The pop-environmental groups agree. We are poised, with last year's adoption of the new Comprehensive Plan, to become commuter bedroom community for more prosperous areas to the south and north. There are worse things. So long as that is what we really want for ourselves. I don't. How about you?

Jack Petree is a Bellingham growth consultant and author of many magazine articles on growth planning.

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