County Planning Commission signs off on comprehensive plan update amid concerns about late changes

Aug. 10—An eleventh-hour legal review and modification of six community plans — a major part of Clatsop County's updated comprehensive plan — have rankled people who helped craft them.

The county Planning Commission on Tuesday voted to recommend that the Board of Commissioners approve the draft community plans for the county's six planning areas.

The votes, all unanimous, marked a crucial moment in the overhaul of the county's comprehensive plan, which has not been fully revised in over 40 years. The document will guide development — from housing and transportation to urbanization and natural resource management — in unincorporated areas over the next two decades.

The comprehensive plan includes the community plans for six regions — Northeast, Clatsop Plains, Lewis & Clark Olney-Wallooskee, Elsie-Jewell, Seaside Rural and Southwest Coastal — as well as statewide land use goals.

In recent months, the Planning Commission had approved all community plans except Southwest Coastal, which the commission ran out of time to review.

Meanwhile, the Portland-based firm Beery, Elsner & Hammond finished its legal review of the plans later than the county had anticipated, county staff explained.

"Subsequent revisions by counsel were significant enough that staff determined the Planning Commission should have a second opportunity to review the drafts before forwarding to the Board of County Commissioners," according to the staff reports for the plans, except for Southwest Coastal.

Policies that the Planning Commission had already approved and sent to the board had been removed.

Some policies were general enough that they could apply to other zones or countywide. These were moved from community plans to the land use goals.

Other policies, such as proposed regulations and development criteria, were specific enough that county staff may move them to the Land and Water Development and Use Code.

A handful of policies were deleted because they were already mentioned elsewhere in the comprehensive plan. Additional policies were cut because the county lacked jurisdiction over them, or the policies ran afoul of state law.

County staff is creating a feature for the county website that will reveal the fate of the missing policies.

The abrupt intervention by legal counsel stunned members of community advisory committees who had volunteered on the plans over the last three years.

Patrick Corcoran, a member of the countywide citizen advisory committee, said, "The last-minute striking of so much text by legal counsel felt like a gut punch." He praised the work of county staff on the comprehensive plan and said the legal review, which he believed should have happened much earlier, was a rare process fumble.

He called on the Planning Commission to work harder to involve the public in land use decisions.

Cheryl Johnson, a member of the Northeast Citizen Advisory Committee, said that her committee and the rest "deserve time to read and consider and understand this drastically different draft."

Nadia Gardner, the former chairwoman of the Planning Commission who presided over the original approval of the community plans, suggested kicking the drafts back to the citizen advisory committees to make sure committee members are comfortable with what they've put their names to. The outcome of the legal review, she said, "certainly warrants that extra scrutiny and involvement of our community members."

Chris Farrar, the chairman of the Planning Commission, said the commission recognized that a great deal of changes had taken place in recent weeks, but that they were largely a matter of moving the policies to a more logical place in the document. "Now, that requires a little trust on everybody's part that that was done with good fidelity," he said.

He said the Planning Commission feels strongly that the work the citizen advisory committees put into the comprehensive plan hasn't been ignored. "It's being massaged and put into a format that is more appropriate for the final document," he said.

The Planning Commission also approved the comprehensive plan's land use goals at Tuesday's meeting. Only Farrar voted against recommending the goals to the Board of Commissioners.

He objected to a Goal 1 policy: "In order to provide increased transparency and opportunities for public involvement in the land use planning process, the county should review options for redrawing the planning area boundaries in order to create boundaries that are coterminous with the Board of Commissioners district boundaries."

Planning areas, Farrar believes, are better defined by the natural environment — topography, geographic features and so on — than by political boundaries that can shift with the census every decade.

The Board of Commissioners will look at the entire comprehensive plan — both the community plans and land use goals — at meetings in September. Written comments from the public are due at the end of August.

"It's, I think, understood by all that this process got a little bit rushed at this particular point, but that there is still time to get your comments in order and in to the Board of Commissioners before they make their final vote on whether to accept these plans for the county," Farrar said. "So I encourage people to do that."