County Council: Urban growth in Columbia Valley will be modest

JARED PABEN - THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

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Urban growth should continue in a valley in east Whatcom County, but the number of new residents the area will accommodate over the next two decades should be low, the County Council stated.

The council on Tuesday, March 17, voted 4-3 to retain an urban growth area in the Columbia Valley, which is located north of Kendall along Kendall Road. Council members Barbara Brenner, Laurie Caskey-Schreiber, Sam Crawford and Ward Nelson voted to retain the urban growth area, and council members Seth Fleetwood, Bob Kelly and Carl Weimer voted to remove it and restrict new growth.

The council also decided that the valley, which has nearly 4,000 residents, should add another 1,000 residents over the next two decades. The council voted 6-1, with Crawford opposed, to plan for a total of 5,000 residents.

That was a much lower rate of growth than had previously been proposed. A draft plan recommended by a committee of foothills residents would have led to an additional 3,200 residents.

The county is under a state growth board order to review and revise the urban growth areas (that includes Birch Bay, Columbia Valley, Cherry Point and all seven cities and their unincorporated urban growth areas) to accommodate the next two decades of growth.

The council was faced with at least two options: Keep the urban growth area, which means the area will continue to develop with the intention that it'll eventually become a city, or remove the urban growth area and give the area a special designation that's neither urban nor rural. Under that special designation, the county would have drawn a tight boundary around development that was there in the early 1990s. Inside the boundary, property could develop like neighboring ones, but outside of the boundary, the land would be rezoned to allow only rural growth. The county Planning Commission had favored that option.

Either way, a project to build 289 homes on former golf course property could be built, because the application is considered vested, developer Blair Murray of Tin Rock Development wrote to the commission in January.

Keeping the urban growth area makes possible commercial construction out there. After the 289 homes, Murray would like to include commercial development, a town center and hundreds more homes as part of the project, called Balfour Village.

How many homes could be limited, depending on how the county revises the urban growth area.