A front-page news story and an accompanying editorial opinion in the Review on Jan. 19 deserve a response. I will offer a different perspective on the council’s decision to enact a six-month moratorium on some types of development. The news story provides useful information on the reasons for this action, but the editor’s opinion includes uncalled-for carping against what he calls “not a public emergency, but a political one.”

More constructively, Mr. Kelly ends by saying, “Hopefully, staff will use this time-out period to better explain how these far-reaching regulations will impact property owners.” With several years of experience as a planning commissioner, I am familiar with both the land use regulations now on the books and several changes that are in the works. I can do some explaining now, and I am eager to participate in the public outreach efforts that are already being planned.

The public hearing that begins at 7 p.m. Feb. 13 provides an occasion for all concerned to offer testimony, raise questions, and learn from other citizens, and I expect that the council and city staff will engage in some discussion after the hearing.

Mr. Kelly notes that Councilman Peltier proposed a moratorium two years ago, when he was new to the council, and explains his success this time simply by “the arrival of new members on the dais.” In my view, the moratorium was an untimely idea two years ago, because we were far from having in place regulations consistent with the updated Comprehensive Plan.

Now, however, we are much closer to that goal, and the moratorium effectively establishes a deadline. It should speed the turning of wheels in the city’s sausage factory. I also hope that citizens (both property owners and the many professionals whose working lives and bottom lines are affected by land use regulations) will be paying attention now. The hard work of bringing the Municipal Code up to date and in line with community values will be done in meetings open to the public.

I often encounter an assumption that city staff and those who work with them only want to make nit-picky and cumbersome regulations more burdensome. That’s not how I see my job, and that’s not how I see the efforts of the planning and public works staff.

I have learned again and again that simple isn’t easy, and often simple isn’t possible, but we do try to make the purposes served by regulations clear and convincing, and we also try to spot the places — there are far too many in the land-use parts of the Municipal Code — where flawed regulations fail to achieve good outcomes, and even lead to some atrocious results. Planners typically get blamed for those results, but planners are only as good as the regulations they are interpreting.

The Critical Areas Ordinance (BIMC 16.20) is a crucial and complex piece of legislation. The state has required that in this update, critical aquifer recharge areas should be better protected, for the sake of quantity as well as quality in our groundwater supply. With support from both planning commissioners and council members, Christy Carr has developed a set of policies that will affect new development in the less-dense zones. Uncertainty about the final shape of those policies was a factor in the moratorium decision. More discussion and a better public understanding of those policies are needed before they are finalized.

There are other updates and improvements in the works. The state has required all Puget Sound jurisdictions to bring low impact development regulations in line with a new set of standards. That work is mostly complete, and a new site assessment review process has been established: it’s going to improve how development (site selection, land clearing, layout of buildings) gets planned and executed.

The ad hoc committee on which I serve has almost completed work on a thorough rewriting of BIMC 16.18. That chapter is currently titled “Land Clearing,” and the proposed new title is “Forest Stewardship, Vegetation Maintenance, and Tree Removal”: note the difference in focus. The last big piece of this updating of land-use regulations is a thorough revision of the design standards for subdivisions: I would love to see that completed in the next six months.

I would be pleased to confer or correspond with anyone who is concerned about the reshaping of land use policies. My name is in the phone book, and my email address is on the city website.

Jon Quitslund is a longtime island resident (1945-57 and 2000 to the present); in retirement, he is often seen in city hall.