Although the Mayor rarely provides the City Council much notice of upcoming agenda items, last week was especially egregious when we received the City’s 200-page Water System Plan just four days before the vote. Although other councilmembers have complained about the lack of time we have to review agenda items, the Mayor has brushed off those concerns, protesting that staff need more time to submit items for the agenda.

Agendas and Agenda Packets

I thought it valuable to ask our neighboring cities how far in advance their staff is able provide their councilmembers with council packets. Here’s a table with the answers. Unsurprisingly, no city listed gives as few days notice to councilmembers as Anacortes, and most give much more time.

The number of workdays the Council has before the meeting is key, because staff aren’t available to answer questions on weekends. With Anacortes’s current system, Councilmembers who work Monday through Friday have essentially no time to get questions answered: if you read your packet Friday night or over the weekend, and email a question over the weekend, you can’t get an answer before Monday…leaving very little to time actually read the response between getting off work and the council meeting time.

Agenda Detail

Most of these other cities also provide much more detail on their agendas and in the packets. For example, most of the cities list whether the Mayor is requesting action (approval, discussion, or public hearing) on the agenda item. Some also list the dates, times, and locations of upcoming council committee meetings and public hearings. Oak Harbor even includes in their council packets a list of pending agenda items for future meetings—another thing that our councilmembers have requested, and we know the Mayor has, but he has refused to provide.

The Case of the Garbage Truck

It’s also useful to compare the content of those packets. For example, at our January 17, 2012, meeting, the City Council approved the purchase of a garbage truck. The packet the Mayor provided the Council included this memo and this 2007 generic purchasing agreement. Notably, the packet didn’t contain the description of the truck, or even the price of the truck. Not until the day of the meeting—only because I asked—did I learn the price was $320,000.

Contrast that with the City of Sedro-Woolley, which also just purchased a garbage truck. This excerpt from their February 22 council packet includes a much more detailed memo from the department head, including the cost of the truck and the balance and expected revenues for the fund from which they expected to pay for it. Their packet also included a detailed quote for the truck, so the council could see exactly what they were buying.

Maybe Sedro-Woolley bought a different truck than we did. Or maybe as a result of their more open process, where the specs on the truck they wanted to buy were open to public view, Sedro-Woolley spent just $292,000 on their garbage truck—almost $30,000 less than we spent.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Both the cities of Mount Vernon and Oak Harbor, and the Town of La Conner, set the deadline for agenda availability in their municipal code. They did so by passing a law, which is the way the legislative branch of government properly checks the action of the executive. That’s what the Anacortes City Council needs to do if it cares about performing its job at the level the voters expect.

* Correction March 19, 2012: This post originally indicated Burlington's City Council meets Fridays. They meet Thursdays.

On Monday, the Anacortes City Council approved an update to the city's Water System Plan, the document that charts the course for the City's largest utility. I voted against it. Here's why.

• We didn't have time to read the document. Although the document is 200 pages long, the Mayor didn't provide the City Council notice that it would be coming to us for approval until we received the agenda on Thursday. Our meeting packets appear online Friday, which leaves very little time for us to read the material. For those of us that work full-time, if we have questions, there's essentially no time to receive and read answers from staff. Moreover, the Mayor didn't actually even provide us a copy of the plan. Our packets included only the executive summary. The plan appears on the City website, but in 30 separate PDF files, some only a single page long, which makes it still harder to read.
• We didn't receive the comments. The Mayor didn't provide us copies of the comments the City received from agencies or the public on the draft plan, and they're not on the website. This is completely unacceptable, especially because the ordinance the City Council approved includes a line (1.8) stating that the Council had considered the comments on the plan. It's obviously important for the Council, as the authority charged with approving the plan, to be able to review those comments. The comments the City received on its 2000 plan were included in the plan itself.
• We used up our once-per-year opportunity to amend the Comprehensive Plan. The ordinance the Council approved explicitly amends the Comprehensive Plan, and makes various statements about how the plan supersedes any existing City policy or plan. State law (RCW 36.70A.130) allows a city to amend its comprehensive plan only once per year. This is a well-established and well-understood limitation that ensures a city doesn't change its comprehensive plan too frequently, and without understanding the cumulative effects of many small changes. Now that the City has amended the comprehensive plan, we can't do so again until next year.
• The conservation goal set in the plan is anemic. The goal amounts to 4.28 million gallons of water saved per year, which might sound like a lot until you consider that in 2007, the system supplied 6,790 million gallons of water, so the conservation goal is equivalent to only 0.06% of the total or 0.2% of the residential demand. The only real conservation measure identified in the plan is that the City will make available dye tablets to help you check if your toilet leaks. The conservation element in Skagit PUD's Water System Plan, by contrast, is much more robust. Most significantly, and unlike PUD, Anacortes does not use conservation pricing even though it is recommended by the State Department of Health. In fact, Anacortes recently doubled base water rates, which will have the effect of further reducing the incentive to conserve.

After the presentation from Public Works, I moved to postpone consideration of the plan to next week so that we would have a chance to actually read it. At our February 3 council retreat, in the context of a discussion about the very short amount of time we have to review materials for meetings, the Mayor promised that "Council does not have to take action on any issue until it is ready to do so." But when I actually requested more time, the Mayor was considerably less than supportive of delaying consideration by even a week, and later made various vague but ominous statements that councilmembers were "personally liable" for having a robust water system and implying we would face some unspecified consequences if we failed to immediately approve the plan—particularly ironic because the City adopted its last required six-year plan twelve years ago.

Other councilmembers have also complained about the amount of time we have to review agenda items, and the level of detail provided in our packets. If we take our jobs as elected officials seriously, it's time to do something about it.

The City Council’s consideration of a switch to a Hearing Examiner system for review and approval of land use applications is moving forward. Here is the process the Planning Director proposed at Monday night’s City Council study session. The City Council did not adopt any process, so what follows is only one possible (but also probable) general approach. We may decide to modify the process as we get into it further.

1. The City Council will begin discussion of the proposal (changes to Anacortes Municipal Code Titles 16-18, and new Title 19) at a study session on March 12. The City Council might suggest alternative language, and would need to decide at the conclusion of the study session how next to proceed.
2. Staff will send the document with the City Council suggestions to an attorney for review.
3. The City Council will discuss the attorney-reviewed document and might consider further changes.
4. At a later meeting, the City Council would itself hold a public hearing on the near-final document.
5. Either immediately following the public hearing, or at some later meeting, the City Council would hold further deliberations, make any (minor) final changes, and then adopt or reject the proposal.

Note that the current draft of the proposal (available here as various documents beginning with the word “Title”) includes two options—one to revise land uses procedures using a Hearing Examiner (Title 19 Option A), and one to revise without adopting a Hearing Examiner (Title 19 Option B). I have repeatedly stated my opposition to adopting a Hearing Examiner system at this time (and I’ll detail that opposition further on this blog sometime later), but I am supportive in concept of reforming our land use procedures, which are currently a sorry mess.

Your comments are welcome. This is a purely legislative (as opposed to quasi-judicial) matter, and you may contact me about it at any time. If you want your comments made part of the record, however, you should submit them through participation in the City’s formal process (i.e. at the public hearing or during an advertised written comment period).

Councilmember Erica Pickett, who the Council elected Mayor Pro-Tem at our first meeting of the year, has assigned each councilmember to four council committees, based on our requests. My committee assignments are:

• Finance
• Parks and Rec
• Personnel
• Planning
• Port/City Liaison (as an alternate)

Although it has improved with Councilmember Adams's efforts to update it, the meeting list on the City’s website still lacks accurate time and place details for these meetings, so I'm maintaining my own version of the list here. My committees are already juggling times to make meetings work with our schedules, so it may take some work to keep it up-to-date.

Much as Oak Harbor and other communities are doing, and as I promised during my campaign, I’ll be working to make these committee meetings more frequent, open, and advertised, and to allow public participation.

Lights will be on at Storvik Park tonight until 9 pm. More winter/snow information.

The City’s Comprehensive Plan and its development code (Anacortes Municipal Code Titles 16, 17, and 18) are adopted by the City Council and together regulate land use in the City of Anacortes. As Planning Commissioner Lin Folsom noted at the last Planning Commission meeting, the City has set the last working day in March as the annual deadline for the public to submit proposed amendments to those regulations.

I’ve spoken repeatedly and at length about the need to revise the entire code, starting from scratch, and without being bound to existing zoning lines. I’ll continue to push for that through getting a head start on our required comprehensive plan update, but in the meantime, if there’s a problem with our land use regulations that you consider especially urgent, please submit a proposal.

Commissioner Folsom specifically suggested that you review the list of uses allowed in your zone, and think about whether you’d feel OK with that use moving in next door. To do that, view a zoning map of the City and determine which zone you’re in. (If you live in Old Town, you’re in both zone R3 and the Old Town Overlay.) Then open the municipal code to Title 17, Zoning, and find your zone. Uses that are outright allowed (no special public hearing required) are listed as “Permitted Uses” or “Permitted Accessory Uses.” Uses that require some form of public hearing are listed under “Conditional Uses.” These uses may or may not be allowed depending on the outcome of that public hearing…but are quite likely to be approved. Also keep in mind that covenants in your development may restrict uses more than the city code.

You’re certainly not restricted to commenting only on your own zone—after all, it’s your city and zones already span vast swaths of land. Please contact me if you have questions or need assistance formulating your ideas. You can find more information about the amendment process in Appendix F of the Comprehensive Plan, or this brochure.

Councilmember Eric Johnson and I attended the Association of Washington Cities Elected Officials Essentials training this weekend in Lynnwood. The AWC folks managed to pack a lot of information into a bit less than two days, and I met some other interesting electeds, learned about other cities’ practices, and brought home a lot of good reading material. If you’re interested in reviewing some of it, here are a few links:

• Steve DiJulio’s Knowing the Legal Territory Presentation

• MRSC’s Newly Elected City Officials Information

• WA Department of Commerce’s Short Course on Local Planning

The event reminded me of the importance of continuing education in any field. Planning Commission Chair Laurie Gere’s comments at the last Planning Commission meeting were similarly on point: instead of a hearing examiner, let’s spend some time educating and training our Planning Commission. Although recently-retired Commissioner Clay Leming had a long background in land use, I don’t think any of our current commissioners do. The field of land use law is complicated, and we ought to give these dedicated volunteers all the training they need.

Photo by Elaine Walker.

The City’s celebration of the Depot, including a presentation to Maria Petrish, the driving force behind its restoration, was quite well-attended Friday night (although we’d have loved to have seen more young people!). The Depot, operated by the Arts Foundation for years, recently switched to the City’s control. The mayor invited anyone with ideas and suggestions for its future to contact him. For some background about what’s envisioned, check out the City's 2006 Depot Master Plan (30mb PDF).

Although usually Ward 1 doesn’t get garbage pickup on Mondays following holidays (and yes I’ve heard your complaints about that), today we do because we’ve had two such Mondays in a row. Although I’d forgotten to put out my trash can, I watched city workers retrieve it from its hiding place to dump it for me. Good job, guys. Remember you can also put out a trash bag of equivalent size to your normal service to make up for last week.

The City and the Anacortes Arts Commission are hosting “A Depot Celebration” at the Depot Arts Center (611 R Ave) featuring a 50-year retrospective focusing on the history of local arts and the Anacortes Arts Foundation. The show runs Friday, January 6 from 4 pm to 9 pm and Saturday, January 7 from 11 am to 4 pm. The mayor and Arts Commission will make presentations at 6:30 pm Friday.

The Depot site is slated for many additional changes. For more information, check out the City's 2006 Depot Master Plan (careful, 30mb PDF).