01-04-2025
Spokane County set to vote on housing, climate policies in line with state law but at odds with feds
Mar. 31—As President Donald Trump and Republican leaders continue their bid to eradicate efforts to combat climate change and historic inequities, the GOP-majority Spokane County Board of Commissioners is set to enact new state-mandated planning guidelines that embrace change. .
The county commissioners will vote Tuesday on new language to be added to the county's comprehensive plan, the guiding document that sets goals and standards for the local government and the municipalities within its boundaries for just about everything that falls under the umbrella of potential growth. Washington's Growth Management Act of 1990 requires counties to update plans every seven years.
The 20-year planning adjustments come after Trump has issued several executive orders seeking to end programs that acknowledge historic wrongs and racial disparities at the federal level, including a recent threat to revoke federal funding to museums and cultural institutions promoting what he considers "divisive, race-centered ideology." He pointed to a current sculpture display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum entitled "The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture," an exhibit that explores "the ways in which sculpture has shaped and reflected attitudes and understandings about race in the United States," according to the museum's website.
Trump's order signed Thursday rebukes the notion proffered in the exhibit that "[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement, while reiterating a long debunked claim popular among eugenicists and the white supremacy movement that race is a biological reality and not a social construct.
If approved, the new guidelines are intended to address climate change and past policies that have disproportionately affected people of color, and to encourage affordable housing development.
Most of the new language and changes in the comprehensive plan bring the county in line with recently enacted Washington laws intended to boost the state's housing stock, address climate change and ensure that environmental risk to that housing is mitigated as much as possible, Spokane County Planning Director Scott Chesney said at a commissioners meeting last week.
"The board updated the countywide planning policies in a significant way in 2022, leaving out housing because the Legislature was taking action to change that," Chesney said.
Chesney told the commissioners the updates to the housing and climate resiliency portions of the plan were brought forward after several community discussions and public comment opportunities, and on the recommendation of the Spokane County Planning Technical Advisory Committee and a regional steering committee of elected officials.
The affordable housing updates were spurred by House Bill 1220 enacted in 2021, which required communities to "plan for and accommodate" housing affordable to all income levels and establish anti-displacement policies. The same bill also required jurisdictions to identify policies and regulations with racially disparate impacts, and to implement policies that may undo some of those impacts within the housing market.
If approved, the proposal would ask jurisdictions within Spokane County to include plans for projected housing needs by economic segments in their own comprehensive plans, in which they are encouraged to avoid concentrations of low-income housing, increase opportunities for housing in areas where it's lacking and support a variety of housing types in single-family neighborhoods.
Diversifying and increasing housing stock across the county to include duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, condos and more is another overarching goal, according to a draft of the proposal included in Tuesday's meeting agenda. Towns, cities and the county itself would also seek to increase avenues to home ownership for that variety of housing under the proposed policy changes.
"It's additional guidance for implementation, and then regional strategies for housing affordability, and then the PTAC focused on adapting that state legislation to housing policy," Chesney said.
The other slate of policy changes being considered Tuesday are to the county's climate change and resiliency section of the comprehensive plan, a segment required to be in every comprehensive plan statewide . If approved, two new goals will be added to the Spokane County comprehensive plan and those of most jurisdictions within the county.
The first, calling for the statewide goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, only applies to towns larger than 6,000 residents. Those jurisdictions will need to plan for the reduction of greenhouse gases and are encouraged to expand use of renewable energy resources, green building practices, public transit and the protection of wild lands, according to a draft proposal.
The second would call on all jurisdictions to support efforts to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of "climate hazards," according to county meeting materials. That would mean identifying what common hazards are, like wildfires or floods, creating goals to mitigate their effects and establishing development regulations that use best practices in reducing risk to the home and homeowner.
