UPDATE | Development moratorium fails to find support from city council

Published 1:42 pm Saturday, January 23, 2016

The idea for a building ban on Bainbridge Island found little immediate support from the city council at its meeting this week.

Councilman Ron Peltier, one of Bainbridge’s newest council members, has been seeking support for a development moratorium that would halt large-scale development on the island since his election last November.

In a December email to council members before he took office, Peltier said he wanted a moratorium on subdivisions, major site plans and major conditional use permits, as well as building permits in high aquifer recharge areas.

At Tuesday’s council meeting, Bainbridge architects and others in the building industry warned that a building ban would negatively impact the island’s economy, result in higher housing costs, and also be legally indefensible.

Others noted the pace of new development on the island and said a building ban would give city staff and others “a chance to breathe,” or raise concerns about an adequate water supply for new projects.

“The moratorium is a solution looking for a problem,” said Dennis Reynolds, a Bainbridge attorney who said he was speaking on behalf of the Kitsap County Association of Realtors, Visconsi (the developers of the controversial shopping center on High School Road) and other developers who did not want to be publicly named.

He supplied the council with statistics he said showed no big upswing in development on Bainbridge in the past few years.

Much of the building on Bainbridge has been in-fill development, he said.

If there is “some rush to develop, the statistics don’t show it,” Reynolds said.

Teresa Osinski, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Kitsap County, said the city needed an identifiable emergency in order to take action on a moratorium.

“You don’t have an emergency,” she said.

Others did not agree.

Stacey Nordgren, a land-use planner who moved to the island a few years ago from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, said she supported a “thoughtful and wise moratorium.”

“The moratorium sounds scary but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a reasonable planning tool,” Nordgren said.

Adopting a moratorium would give the community and the city “time to breathe,” she said.

Creating a moratorium ordinance for a future council vote never came up for a vote, however, as a majority of the council declared they wouldn’t support it.

Councilman Kol Medina said the moratorium idea was relevant, given the city planning director’s observation last month that the historic drop-off in permit activity that happens each fall never occurred this past year.

And with the development that has already occurred on Bainbridge, combined with the fact the city was updating its comprehensive plan, “to me that set off some alarm bells,” Medina said.

He said he didn’t want a moratorium that would affect single-family home construction island-wide, but added that he was concerned about large-scale development, especially development that included clear cutting trees.

“I believe that something is broken here,” he said.

The longterm fix is updating the city’s comp plan and development rules, Medina said, but added that effort may take two years.

Medina said a moratorium could be an answer, but he also added that he didn’t think it was legally defensible.

Instead, he suggesting looking for quick changes to land-use rules that would prohibit the clearing of “large stands” of trees.

Councilman Mike Scott said he shared the concerns about the pace of change on the island, and the region.

“But I have serious questions about whether a moratorium is the right way to go, I’m concerned about adverse consequences,” Scott said.

A moratorium was “a very blunt instrument” that would have far reaching and potentially adverse consequences, such as raising the cost of housing, he added.

“It’s just not the right tool,” agreed Councilman Wayne Roth.

Roth disputed the notion that talk of a moratorium had put the issue of development front and center.

The city and community have been actively involved in the topic of growth as work continues on updating the city’s comprehensive plan, the expansive policy document that will guide development on the island for the next two decades.

Bainbridge Island has set an example for the amount of public involvement as the comp plan process continues, Roth said.

“We are the leaders,” Roth said.

Council members ultimately decided to have its tree committee continue to look at possible revisions to tree-cutting regulations.