Change is inevitable, growth is optional

Published 1:30 am Friday, August 15, 2025

The city of Bainbridge Island was founded in 1991 on the principles of preserving the island’s special character and the sustainable use of its limited natural resources. What Bainbridge Islanders created, however, was an entity destined to forget why it exists and gravitate to what it deems most important: ever-increasing revenues to support salaries, benefits, and favors for special interests.

This was painfully obvious during a recent city council discussion about funding upgrades to the Winslow sewage treatment plant, when members lamented that the city “needs more revenues.” The same night, they awarded an $80,000 grant to the Chamber of Commerce. Increased revenues depend on growth, which generates additional property taxes, real estate excise tax, and sales tax. Never mind how growth impacts our quality of life and depletes limited natural resources, our city is obsessed with increasing revenues. It plans to get them with unprecedented up-zoning of Winslow and ever-increasing utility fees.

To pave the way for massive up-zoning, the city even has a committee flagging “questionable” language, such as “Winslow’s small town atmosphere,” for removal from the guiding principles of the island’s Comprehensive Plan. To overcome islanders’ natural resistance to growth, the city has conducted a campaign of disinformation for the past three years by representing the state’s Growth Management Act (GMA) as a Growth Mandate Act.

The cornerstone of this campaign for accelerated growth is House Bill 1220, a recent amendment to the GMA. HB 1220 adds housing requirements to the GMA, but does not remove other important requirements such as: protection of groundwater resources; environmental protection; historic preservation; adequate infrastructure to support growth; and anti-displacement.

As far as the city is concerned, all of those other requirements of the GMA take a back seat to the increased revenues to be reaped from the up-zoning and the ramped-up growth supposedly mandated by HB 1220. Bainbridge Island is the only EPA-designated sole source aquifer island city in the United States, surrounded by saltwater. Development of a Groundwater Management Plan for our unique island city, however, has been treated like the long-delayed inconvenience our city government sees it as, while the city obsessively parrots supposed HB1220 housing mandates.

The GMA, though, paints a much different picture of its requirements, one the city of Bainbridge Island would rather we didn’t know about: RCW 36.70A.3201

“The legislature finds that while this chapter requires local planning to take place within a framework of state goals and requirements, the ultimate burden and responsibility for planning, harmonizing the planning goals of this chapter, and implementing a county’s or city’s future rests with that community.”

There’s another aspect to the city’s tender embrace of supposed growth mandates: It’s expensive. Housing units at the city’s 625 Winslow Way project—the old police station site—are projected to cost around $500,000 each. Growth also requires expensive infrastructure upgrades. If, as the city claims, we are mandated to grow and provide a specific number of affordable housing units, what the city is describing is an unfunded state mandate, which is prohibited by state law (RCW 43.135.060).

City officials claiming that the GMA mandates specific growth targets are using disinformation as political cover for what they, on their own, want to do: ramp up growth, increase revenues, and pander to the special interests who help them get elected. This campaign of disinformation falls woefully short of the city’s self-imposed requirement to tell the truth. Don’t expect a sudden epiphany at the city. What I expect, however, is ordinary Bainbridge Islanders saying no to misguided attempts to up-zone and build our way to affordability, and in the process ruin our island.

The GMA says our future rests with the community. I’m beginning to see signs of that awakening.

Ron Peltier served on the Bainbridge Island City Council from 2016 through 2019, during which time he represented Kitsap County on the Puget Sound Regional Council Growth Management Policy Board. He is currently a member of the board of directors of the nonprofit Bainbridge Conservation Coalition.