Council to provide Winslow Subarea feedback to Planning Commission

Published 1:30 am Thursday, February 5, 2026

City of Bainbridge Island leaders will provide the Planning Commission with a temperature check on the recently-finalized draft of the Winslow Subarea Plan at its Feb. 10 meeting, following a wide-ranging discussion at a city council study session Feb. 3.

At the meeting, councilmembers unanimously agreed to provide feedback on the Winslow plan at the next council business meeting, as a way to signal whether the Planning Commission’s recommendations are on the right track before the council sees the plan in its entirety for the final time later this year.

Deputy mayor Kirsten Hytopoulos explained that during a meeting of the Steering Committee — a combined group of city councillors and planning commissioners — it came to light that the recommendations the Planning Commission had created for the Winslow Subarea Plan were going to be incorporated into the larger Comprehensive Plan.

“We were not looking to be able to delve into it as a council until very near the end of the process, which was not feeling comfortable,” said Hytopoulos. “What we are here to do today is to take a look and give our broader feedback. We are not here to dissect the motions and redo the motions — that would be overstepping — but to give some pretty clear direction about what might be in particular policies that have been developed that would cause any of us, to be frank, to feel that we wouldn’t be able to vote for a Comp Plan that contained those.”

Bainbridge Island is about 14 months late in submitting its Comp Plan, a document that outlines how a city and its infrastructure will grow and change over a period of about 20 years. State law requires that cities incorporate some housing for people of all income levels into the plan, no small lift for a community like Bainbridge, where housing stock skews primarily to the affluent end of the spectrum.

In fall 2025, the city hired consultant Joe Tovar to help create a roadmap to completion for the Comp Plan that set due-dates for information from each body of government that contributes to the plan — the PC, the city council and city staff — with a goal of submission in June 2026.

Part of Tovar’s recommendation included that the PC finish its recommendations for the Winslow Subarea Plan — the subregion of the island where the city opted to site the majority of dense housing — by Deccember 2025. They did it; however, the next time it will undergo council review is later in the process, when the stakes for any potential requested edits will be much higher.

At the Feb. 3 meeting, councilmembers shared their opinions on the PC’s recommendations and assessed whether the Winslow plan seemed to align with their vision for the Comp Plan.

Councilmember Mike Nelson argued that one of council’s instructions from Tovar included a policy that requested the PC be “laser-focused on getting the Comp Plan done” in order to be in compliance with state law, but that with some of the zoning changes made in the Winslow Subarea Plan, the commission had unlawfully exceeded that mandate.

Nelson said that the floor area ratio, a planning metric that determines the mass of buildings, in several Winslow sub-neighborhoods could add more housing than was stipulated by state law — “the minimum standard that communities must use to allocate housing needs,” per the Puget Sound Regional Council.

“I think that, to put it in perspective, you can go up to five stories, but when you get to the max FAR, that’s when my eyes start to pop open a little bit,” said Nelson. “That’s a significant increase in density […] I start to think that the capacity numbers might come back pretty astronomical.”

Councilmembers Clarence Moriwaki and Leslie Schneider disagreed. Both pointed out that the PC had “done exactly what we asked them,” but did note that the policy was not specific about what that zoning looked like. That’s why it had to get updated, said Moriwaki.

“It’s not happening tomorrow. Look at our population growth over the last five years — it’s not gone anywhere, in fact, it’s dropped a bit. This fear of ‘massive growth’ (is) because we’re planning for what we have to with the Growth Management Act, it’s not happening now with the existing zoning we have,” said Moriwaki. “I understand people’s passions are there, but let’s not use fear to make an argument — let’s keep it on facts.”