Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good evening and welcome to the November 18 meeting of the Kitsap County Planning Commission. Thank you for your participation. Some general housekeeping words. The administration Building is currently under a fire watch due to malfunction of the building's fire alarm system. In the event of emergency that requires evacuation, we will notify you directly and ask you to immediately and orderly leave the building through any of the identified exits.

The main exit from this room is into the lobby through the set of doors at the far end where you all entered. Once in the lobby, please exit the building either through the doors to the left or proceed down the stairs and exit through the doors to the level below. There is also a single exit up here in the front of the room that can be used. Before we begin this morning, this evening's proceedings, I'd like to remind everyone that this is an official meeting with the Kitsap County Planning Commission conducted in accordance with the Washington State Open Public Meetings Act and the Roberts rules of order. We ask that all attendees remain respectful throughout the proceedings.

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Thank you for helping us maintain a courteous, respectful and professional environment. This is a hybrid meeting. Please silence all electronic devices during the hearing. If attending in person, please refrain from conversations with other attendees and staff during the meeting. If you wish to make a general public comment, we have four methods available.

First is for virtual attendees, raise your hand at the appropriate time using the raise your hand button at the bottom of the window. Your name will be called and your microphone will be muted unmuted. Second, call in attendees may signal by pressing 9 on your keypad. Your last four digits of your phone number will be called and you will be connected. You may need to dial 6 to unmute your phone.

Third, written comments testimony can be submitted to the staff or emailed to cjewelkidzap dot gov by 2PM of the day prior to the meeting. Please indicate the date of the meeting, comments are intended for, your name, agenda item and subject to your addressing. The submitted comments will then be entered into the record at the appropriate time. For all speakers, please state your name and the general area in which live. Comments are normally limited to two minutes for general public comments and three for public hearings. These times are adjustable by the chair when appropriate. First order of business is to adopt the agenda.

I move to adopt the agenda as read.

Second.

All those in favor? Unanimous. Second item in the agenda is to adopt the minutes from the 10/21/2025 meeting.

I move to adopt the meeting minutes from the tentwenty one meeting. Go ahead.

I second.

Discussion, is there anything that needs to be changed?

Sure. On page five, line 38, I think the word that struck out and the one that's in red are opposite of each other according to the lines above. Commissioner Shattuck amended to he moved to amend the word soften oh, sorry. To replace minimize with the word soften. And down below, it strikes out soften and puts in red minimize. So I think those are supposed to be just reversed.

Agreed. Any other comments? Need a motion to pass with the amendment.

I motion to pass the tentwenty one meeting minutes with the amendment by Commissioner Vliet.

Second.

All those in favor? No opposed? The minutes pass. This opens the first general public comment period.

Yeah. Point of order, chair, can we please do introductions?

Yes.

Kathy Meisenberg, North Kitsap.

David Vliet, North Kitsap. Allen Beam, Central Kitsap.

Tammy Bowen, North Kitsap.

Ashley Hall, South Kitsap.

Caleb Nelson, South Kitsap.

Danielle Douthat, South Kitsap.

Good evening, Adrian Hampton, Central Kitsap.

Thank you very much. Now it's time to open the general public comments, first period. Do we have any comments from the room? Seeing none, do we have any comments online?

No virtual public comments at this time.

Seeing none, this will close the first general comment period. That opens us up for a briefing on boundary line adjustments.

Can you put the presentation up, please?

Evening, commissioners. I'm getting a green light instead of a red light on my mic. Good evening, commissioners. We're here tonight to talk to you about boundary line adjustment code. It's something that DCD has been talking about for many, many years.

As you probably have observed in reading through some of your materials, it's it's an issue that can be fraught with lots of errors in how boundary line adjustments are treated. And we have found that as Kitsap County is the only jurisdiction that we're aware of that doesn't have a boundary line adjustment code, that we are receiving applications and we're treating applications, I'm sorry, BLAs not applications, but we're receiving BLAs that we review when they're created in error And this would allow for us to help be consistent with our treatment of boundary line adjustment ordinances. And it would prevent in the end a lot of issues with new landowners specifically, but also clouding of titles and instant purchaser requests. So there definitely is some there's good reasons for why we're doing this and why other jurisdictions have done this. And we're hoping to get on board with those.

Thank you, Scott. I'm Carrie Salee, long range planner for DCD. Scott took a little bit of my intro, but I will go ahead and just get right into the briefing. As Scott said, a boundary line adjustment is a way to make minor adjustments to property lines. It can also be used to combine or merge properties.

And the resulting lots are required to conform to the zoning district, provide an adequate building site, which means you have to be able to have adequate setbacks and other things, and comply with other requirements such as having adequate access to the site. As Scott mentioned, Kitsap County is the only county in Washington that we're aware of that doesn't have specific codes that pertain to boundary line adjustments. Not all other jurisdictions have a section in their code called boundary line adjustments. They might scatter them in their building code, in their subdivision regulations, in other places, but this is the only one that has nothing that addresses BLAs. So as Scott said, this has created a number of problems.

When boundary line boundary lines are adjusted, they're recorded, we've never had a chance to review them, make sure they conform with our development regulations. And then, unfortunately, sometimes what's happened is people have come in with a permit application, and it's been determined that they don't have legal lot status. They don't have a lot that they can build on. So we want to propose a new boundary line adjustment code, and we're also doing a few amendments in existing code as well because we want to establish a formal application process. It's proposed to be type one ministerial to have as the least amount of regulation and time delay as possible for property owners, but it will ultimately, we believe, be for their benefit, not just for the people who own the property today, but for anyone who buys it in future.

So as we were developing the code this last year, we want to make sure that what we do is consistent with state law in state subdivision regulations for boundary line adjustments and subdivisions. We also wanted to be sure that we were consistent with the existing county subdivision regulations, which are entitled 16. We wanted to provide a single, predictable, and consistent process for everyone to be able to use to submit, have reviewed, and have approved prior to recording with the county auditor. And this also supports ongoing DCD efforts to identify and correct nonconforming lots. Not all of them, for sure, are the result of boundary line adjustments.

There are many other reasons a lot could be nonconforming, but we're trying to prevent new ones for this reason. This prevents future nonconformities resulting from BLAs that are done incorrectly, and it also limits the uncertainties, the impacts, expenses, and delays for new buyers. Frequently we found that what happens is somebody is trying to close on a purchase and their real estate agent calls up to get zoning confirmation. Is this conforming to the zone? And we may have to say no.

And that can really throw a wrench into the closing process. So we want to try to avoid that for buyers. So as I said, we've been working on this code since the late spring. Our goal was to make it as simple as possible. So we looked back at what back about five years ago, six years ago, current planning had prepared a spreadsheet of a number of issues that they would like to see addressed in the battery line adjustment code.

We used that as a starting point. And we've also wanted to not reinvent the wheel, so we've pulled in code that appears to be working well for other jurisdictions. Pierce County is one of those. City Of Paulsbo is another. So we've tried to pull in stuff that we know is working elsewhere and come up with a compilation that will work for us.

Not overly complicated, not not too onerous to go through the process, but that addresses all of the issues that we've had in the past with nonconforming lots created through BLAs. And so here today, what's happened is in October, we issued the first BLA draft for the public to review, and we accepted public comment for three weeks in October. And we have also issued CEPA. That CEPA comment period ends on December 1, and we have a PC work study coming up after this on the December 2, one day after the CEPA comment period opens. So you may be getting a few more comments from me handed out at that meeting that we didn't have time to put in the packet.

Hopefully not, but we'll see. Then in January, we go into the PC public hearing, and in February to the board public hearing. And we're hopeful that this will be adopted by the February. Oops. So to go a little more into the public comments, you received the public comments, the bulk of them in your packet, and that was a three week comment period, October.

We had only had 18. So, you know, again, this is this is a very small group of people, primarily from agencies, such as the health district and from licensed surveyors here in Kitsap County who've been practicing with boundary line adjustments for many years, so their comments were very helpful. 44% are opposed to having a boundary line adjustment code, 11% support. 44, their comments we would say would be neutral, such as saying be sure you do this or don't do that or, you know, how how will you address this questions. The the opposition comments concerns about over regulation.

Is this redundant to other regulations already in our code? Will there be excessive cost associated with this process? And how efficient will this be? How long will it take to turn an application around and get it recorded? The supportive comments saying, yes, we think this will result in better clarity, better understanding of what we're supposed to do to do a BLA right. It'll be consistent. We'll understand that if we do it this way this time, we should be able to do it that way every time, and we'll get it right. And transparency, so that everyone understands what it takes to get a BLA approved. Everyone's operating by the same regulations. Everyone has to go through the same level of review.

Neutral, again, mostly just questions and concerns about how we will coordinate, get agency reviews, how long will it take, how difficult will the process be for me to go through this. And the public comments will be considered, in preparation for the public hearing draft ordinance, which will be prepared, for your meeting in December. You will see, in the addendum that was handed out to you before the meeting, in the public comments, we did find in that review that there were three in particular that we felt would be really good to incorporate into the draft language. And so I wanted to bring those to you tonight just so you could see if you had any concerns about certain public comments. Three of them at least, we agree with the commenters that, yes, these are good changes to make.

And so I I can discuss those with you in more detail if you'd like, but just to let you know that we will be following up on those commenters. And I'm happy to go through any of the code language in detail or any of the public comments. I will let you let me know how you would like me to focus, if you'd like me to go into any more depth on these materials. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, if I could just add on to that. One of the things about BLAs, particularly larger BLAs, is they happen usually, if not almost always. The neighbors are upset about adjacent development, and then it happens or in the past it's happened. And people realize there's nothing they can do about it and they move on. And probably the biggest example of a BLA acting as a subdivision when it shouldn't have is called Skyfall. It's in Central Kitsap. It was 150 lots that came in through BLA. It didn't benefit from any review by DCD. It came in, and they started developing it.

And the neighbors were completely upset that there was not a public process associated with that. And since then, they've they've learned to live with it. It's just the way it is. And so that leads to my point that quite often these things happen throughout the county. And people are a lot of people are upset about that, but they realize there's nothing that can be done about it.

And so things time passes and and everybody gets gets over their frustrations. But if you were to take the number of people that have been upset about BLAs in the past and invite them to a public hearing, personally invite them, you probably have a fair amount of people attending the public hearing. It is something that we've heard from a lot of people in the past. And so it's important, but people don't realize how important until it pops up next door to them. So it's kind of a fractured thing that we see.

More often than not, what we see is the individual one offs that Carrie was speaking a lot about, you know, people that are trying to develop it, develop a piece of property. If they buy a piece of property and they sit on it for years, then they may not know they've got an issue. But when it comes time to develop, that's when that issue will present itself. And then we have to look at innocent purchaser agreements and try to help people out as best we can. But we think that with good middle ground code, we can help the public and represent their best interests.

Questions?

Yeah. For either one of you, question that's, I guess, maybe built on itself. On page three of your presentation of the PowerPoint deck, project objectives, Curious. This is gonna be a bit of a process. I don't know what your guys' volume of BLA applications would really look like.

But what I noticed with this proposed plan is that this is like a formal application that gets reviewed by DCD unlike our neighboring counties and municipalities, which have an online form, a little bit more streamlined process in in that instance. But so I guess question on adding a lot of workload to our already struggling staff. And then my second question is, I noticed the language here is support DCD efforts to identify and correct nonconforming lots. I was curious if you could just speak into correct. And what does that mean, what would that look like, and who does that apply to, and how?

So when we're referring to identifying and correcting nonconforming lots, it's kind of what Scott was saying when someone comes in and could be an innocent purchaser, they might have held this lot for ten or fifteen years, they find out that they have a nonconforming lot that was created that way through the boundary line adjustment process, or it could be through some other process. But for some of these people, let's say in rural residential the minimum lot size is five acres, and your lot is created with two. And it didn't go through it's not vested. It didn't go through a process when that was allowed. So going through the BLA process with us to resolve the legal status If you can't if you want to do a BLA to bring it back to five acres, if you want to do that with someone who has a larger property next to you, that's one way of correcting the status of that property and making it legal conforming.

Okay.

I can give you

Oh, go ahead.

I'm sorry. I can give you an example, if you'd like, of something we're working on currently, which is a landowner who has done a BLA of two lots, and the BLA is not legal. It doesn't meet our current, albeit minimal, definition of BLAs. But the resultant lots, one of them is not in conformance with our definition. And so that's an example of where you have a landowner who has complete control to revoke or revise that BLA because they're in ownership of both parcels at this time.

Okay. I think maybe the way that I read that is to identify and correct seems maybe possibly insinuating some sort of retro or you're going to seek out and find nonconforming lots, but it's truly as they're coming through for application only at that point, you'll be identifying them. Is that not happening now? So you guys are we're not you're currently not identifying nonconforming lots as they come through? Or

We do. We look at those. We don't catch them all.

Okay.

And then quite often, it results in an innocent purchaser agreement. Sorry, I'm probably not speaking in the mic close enough. Quite often, it involves an innocent purchaser agreement. And really, none of that is have has is it a parcel that has had taxes paid on it as if it were otherwise a legal lot? And if the answer is yes, then then, course, it makes sense to support the landowner and their development of that because it's been taxed. And so it should be treated as any other parcel.

Okay. And I guess kind of back to my very, very first question, supporting staff process improvement, have has there been any overview as far as what that act I know that was a lot of the question is what is the what's the process gonna look like? What's the turnaround time? You know, things like that. Is this very are we so preliminary in this that there's no information to share around that, or has that been kind of slowly getting worked out?

It is proposed to be a type one decision, so administrative and ministerial, which means that it's a decision that would be made at the managerial level. So, will be, I'm assuming, an online form like all of our other applications of that type. And we will have a guidebook that helps people understand what this process is, since it's completely new for Kids App, and to tell them how to apply fees, things like that. We don't really have a time that I can give you right now for review. I don't know if Scott wants to guesstimate on that.

I don't want to guesstimate on that, but I concur with everything that Carrie has said. We want to increase our efficiency. This would be subject to the Senate Bill 05/1990 and its timeframe. So that's much more reasonable than it used to be in terms of even a short plat review, right? And those are supposed to be pretty small.

But it is a type one. We're going to it's going to be an online application process, and we're going to try and move it along as quickly as we can. So we're looking at those efficiencies all the time. But it hasn't been built out yet. You know, we didn't want to put a lot of you know, there's a it involves a front end workload on that that we didn't want to do unless we knew this had support by the board and the planning commission.

One of the other things I just I was thinking about just a moment ago as you were asking a question, actually, is one of the things we've attempted to do with this draft is prevent creation of new lots that would be really unreasonable or difficult to develop. And so you see a lot of criteria in there, a fair amount, that suggests, for example, you you have to have a developable area. We were seeing BLAs that were kind of putting the future buyer in a hard position where, yeah, you could buy this, but now you gotta apply for a variance, maybe even a critical areas reduction. And all of those are very expensive. And sometimes the landowner, or I should say, often the landowner is not aware of any of that or what it takes to hire a wetlands consultant, and the cost and the time.

And so when we stipulate that you've got to create a developable parcel through your BLA, I think that's an example of going a long ways to ensure that the public can rely on a well reviewed and thought out program.

If I could just add one thing. You know, when Scott is talking about innocent purchasers, you know, I think it is important to remember that other counties are taking BLAs through the approval process. There is some level of oversight and application of the development regulations. But what happens here, people may be assuming that that's happening. They may think that the county has had an opportunity to look at it, so the slot got recorded, so it must be okay.

And you know, that's something that we want to again, we're trying to protect the buyer, as well as protect the seller, because the buyer can always come back and say, Hey, you sold me something with a problem on it and I can't use it. So this is another reason.

Good evening. I'm just curious, does Kitsap County's DCD department have a licensed surveyor on staff that would be reviewing these applications, or would this be just whatever's being submitted by the applicant and what's being required of them to submit?

We do have a county surveyor on staff. That's Ken Swindon. But we trust that licensed surveyors are doing their job. When they prepare revised survey maps and legal descriptions, no, the intent is not for the planners to review it and second guess the surveyors who in their professional capacity have prepared these instruments.

And we have a checklist for our current planning process that you've essentially got to check those boxes. We'll have something similar for BLAs. And then we do have somebody in development engineering that kind of checks one of the most important things, is called lot closures, to make sure that you've got no gaps in your overall legal description or individual legal descriptions of the lots themselves. So that is done. That's done in house.

Ken Swindemann works for public works, but you saw comments from him. If we have any questions about surveys or subdivisions, we will talk to him. But it's meant to be something that we can look at and see the surveyor, again, under their professional licensure, has addressed all these things that we ask for in our code. So I won't use BLA, but like a regular long plat, you know, are they showing necessary sidewalks and those kinds of things. The BLA doesn't go through that kind of review, but it's a checklist. Our staff will look at it and see, did they address this, yes, this, and that. So it should be a relatively painless process for review, I said famously.

So you were mentioning that maybe some of the comments that came in were I had to tag along on the last comment were from the survey community. And so I don't know what I'm missing, is it because they think that the staff is going to be taking on that surveying capacity? Or it just seems like something like this will I don't know if I'm missing something. It will require more surveying to happen, more work to happen in that industry where there may be concerned with what we're doing here or what we're proposing.

You're right. It was puzzling to me as well initially to get comments from surveyors that appeared to be opposed to more surveying. Most of the comments that I received from the surveyors that were in opposition or generally negative were about what they believed would be the increase in complication of doing BLAs, increasing the time that their clients would have to wait. It wasn't so much about they weren't complaining that we're going to create an unreasonable workload on them. It's simply, you know, this process works for us, for them. Why are you doing this? Why are you creating a process when, you know, this has been the way it's been for one hundred years?

And if I can add to that, it seemed to me a little in contrast of what we got last year, probably about thirteen months ago when we or maybe more when we brought up BLAs and the surveyors testified that they'd like to help us and even develop a model ordinance. And so it seemed like we had some favor of the with the surveying community to help us move this along. And so I think I think I think the surveyors themselves maybe go back and forth on this a little But in answer to your question, David, I'd like to maybe give an example. We have what I'll call just a couple different kinds of plats. And forget their names, it doesn't really matter.

But we've got plats like a long plat or an urban short plat that requires urban facilities. It requires sidewalks. It requires street trees. It requires all these things that you've seen when you drive by a subdivision that's ready to develop. It's got the stubs. It's good to go. And then we've got some short plants that occur in our rural areas where all you're doing is dividing lots. You're not requiring any other improvements. You're not requiring rural levels of service or you're not requiring buffers or fencing or anything like that. It's just a simple land division you're doing on paper.

And that's what this would be like. That's this would be closely aligned to think of the four lot short plat that we do for our rural areas. It wouldn't require a lot more attention than simply making sure you've got a an accurate legal description to begin with, and then moving those lot lines as as you see fit as long as they comport to the proposed code. So it's a different kind of animal with our other surveys.

Thank you. That was very helpful.

Hi. I have a random question just because I don't know, which is on the proposed revisions to existing code, you added in Section sixteen point one zero point zero seven zero boundary line adjustments. And so you're adding two but not more than five abutting plats. So is that like a typical number, the five? I was just curious how we got to five versus any other number.

This is to try to make it consistent with the options that are in state subdivision law. The base short plat is one to four lots. You can expand that up to nine. But right now we're trying to make it consistent so that we have a process that is we don't what Scott was talking about where someone takes many lots and moves them all around. Basically what you have is a long subdivision. And we're trying to prevent that workaround where we end up with a plat that hasn't undergone any plat review, hasn't complied with any of the requirements.

Thank you. We have Planning Commissioner Hampton on line.

Say again, please.

We have planning commissioner Hampton online with a comment.

Go.

Thanks. And thank you so much for the presentation. It's been great to listen to this conversation so far. I had a very basic question and then a few follow-up questions on the review criteria in the draft, so I'll try to be short. So I just wanna make sure that when it says within the revised code, and I'm looking at the version revised November 5. So when it refers to the director, that is the director of DCD. Is that correct?

That's correct.

Okay. Great. And then within the review criteria, for number two, I'm I wonder if you can maybe just translate that for me. And I'm curious if a boundary line adjustment would ever come into conflict or result in some type of zoning change. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?

Are are you asking if you can implement a zoning change through a boundary line adjustment? Are are you asking, like, if you had one property that was zoned x and another zoned y, could you move the boundary line and suddenly you've rezoned?

Correct. How would how would you answer that?

I know that we're preventing split zoned properties. So if you are go if you want to rezone, I would say that you're going to have to go through a rezone at the same time. Now let's say you have residential on one and commercial on the other, that may also require a comp plan amendment to the land use map to implement that.

Thank you. I appreciate that. And then just a a grammatical thing in the review criteria under 10. It refers to Kitsap County Health District. I believe that should be Kitsap Public Health District, a name change many years ago.

Thank you. One

piece that I noticed, see on your guys' boundary line adjustment, public facing page, meeting dates and materials, you've got the December 9. That public hearing is the second. Is that correct?

Yes. It is. I will check on that because we have nothing on the ninth. So thank you for bringing that to our attention.

It is on the second though. Correct? It is. Okay. Just yet to give people an opportunity should they so seek.

The second one, on number eight under the review guidelines, I guess the intent for the concurrent sequential series of multiple proposed adjustments and to not alter, I guess, having the effect of altering a recorded plat. Is that gonna be left up to the director's interpretation of when that plat was first recorded? I mean essentially each BLA is part of a greater plat of some to some extent when it was originally platted. Where's the I guess where's the confines of who makes that determination?

Do you want answer that or I can we talk to Lisa about this.

Go for it.

Okay. Yeah.

Let me pull the comments that we had from the prosecuting attorney's office because we discussed that as well.

The answer is there's there's a mix. Things you can do and things you can't do without filing a recorded alteration of a a final plat that's already been recorded. So certain changes you can make in this within an already established subdivision. Some of our lots out there were never part of a subdivision. Sure. And then there's certain changes you cannot make without going through a a new application to report a revision to a final plat. But we do have specificity here.

I got you. Sorry, go ahead.

No, no. One of our commenters, one of the surveyors, had also said that he didn't think that a BLA could alter an existing plat. And as Scott was saying, it depends. Can alter some things but not others. So a BLA can be between and I'm reading from what legal had advised us on a BLA can be executed between platted and unplatted lots, and that the mere adjustment of a lot line, and this is per the RCW, does not require a plat alteration. So just because you alter a lot line within a plat doesn't mean you've created a plat alteration per state law.

Correct. So as I guess as far as them as far as their interpretation of that review guideline, it's just that whatever the hundred twenty day grace period by the time it's recorded, or is it meaning for the entirety?

I'm I'm not sure I understand.

Yeah. Could you rephrase your question?

I guess when you're talking about but not not having the effect of altering the plat, are you just talking before that plat is actually recorded?

No. No. What we're talking about is a BLA. So you've got a recorded plat. Let's say it's in an urban area, and you go in and you alter that through a BLA. There's some things you can do and some things you can't do. And so it doesn't really have anything to do with the recordation period of of I'm presuming or we're presuming that the plat's already been recorded and developed. And now a neighbor wants to, you know, acquire some land from another neighbor that would could alter a plat.

And so if that were to be the case, even if it wasn't, maybe it's in one of these rural areas that wasn't necessarily platted out, or if it was, I guess, specifically, if it was an urban area that maybe was platted out in 1930, is that still gonna be considered altering a plot if they go through that?

So the answer to the the it's a good question about how old. Yes. The answer is yes. We've just we've had a fairly recent legal opinion that some of the lots out towards Manchester, those legacy lots, those tiny historic lots that people often aggregate for tax purposes, are subject to the same rules that a plat would be if it was recorded last year, an alteration. So that's part of your answer, and I'm forgetting the first part of

your question.

That that's more of a Okay.

Recording in progress.

The if I may, mister chair, just a couple other things. When when we we've been working on on BLA and keeping track of BLA issues for quite some time. But when we last thought we would take a run at this was probably about six years ago or so, maybe closer to five. And so what staff did at that time is they surveyed, they questioned about 17 other jurisdictions. And they put together a massive table of what those jurisdictions regulated per individual codes.

And I think it was about 20 or so different elements of regulation where we have 10. So similar in in concept to to these regulations. But I think there was a menu of about 20 items that that people could choose from if they wanted to do a a new BLA code. And we chose to kind of moderate that a bit. So came into this fairly well advised as to what other jurisdictions were doing. So I wanted to point out that in terms of background, this isn't something we just developed on our own. We used a lot of resources of other jurisdictions to help us get started.

Any further questions from the commissioners?

And I've got one last thing just to make it clear, put a ball around this. This is not impacting

Recording in progress.

This would not impact those who want to move a lot line because of a shed encroachment or a driveway or a fence. Those kinds of things are not what we're asking to come to DCD. So we'll make that clear in our application processes as well. Is that that's something you can fix often on your own if you're a little capable with your neighbor and record on your own. So that's important.

Adrian, we've been bouncing in and out of communication. Do you have any further questions? I don't know if she can hear me.

Yeah, sorry we're having some technical difficulties.

Okay. Having no further questions on this, thank you very much.

Thank you.

We'll hit you in a public comment period. The next item on the agenda is work study for comp plan revision.

Thank you, mister chair. This is a response, that the county has put together for the recent, comprehensive plan remand from the growth management hearings board, and also to respond to the certification letter that was issued by the Puget Sound Regional Council. This was brought to you last month, I think it was the twenty first before a briefing just to let you know, this is the status of the remand and of the certification process. And so since that time, we have put together some Recording in progress. Some proposed changes to the comprehensive plan, some additions that we hope will largely, although not completely yet, but largely meet the requirements of the hearings board and the PSRC.

I will go back over the background and where we are now just to bring everyone back up to speed. So last year in December, we adopted our new 2024 comprehensive plan update. That was required update, major update. And it was appealed, in January by several parties, including Futurewise. Futurewise is the only one that carried forward after review by the hearings board.

And the hearings board found that consistent with Futurewise's appeal, we had a couple of deficiencies in our plan. One is housing, that the methodology that we used in our land capacity analysis possibly overstated our redevelopment capacity, didn't count the potential for residential development in mixed use zones where you would combine commercial and residential properties, and also failed to demonstrate that we have sufficient housing capacity for our lower income groups generally considered to be zero to 80% of average median income. The second thing was wildfire risk and planning and evacuation planning. The land use element, they felt did not adequately address wildfire risks, citing of development and critical facilities outside of wildfire risk zones, And that it also didn't address emergency evacuation, designating routes, interagency coordination, making sure that in case of an emergency, which includes wildfires but is not limited to wildfires, that there would be adequate planning and support in such a situation. So that was in early August.

In late August we got our certification review on the comprehensive plan from the PSRC. Nominally they review only the transportation element to certify it when we have to be in compliance with our transportation element to be eligible for grant funding on our transportation program. But in practice, they review the whole plan. And especially for anything that applies even peripherally to transportation, they will comment. They will say, hey, we've identified these deficiencies.

So they concurred with the hearings board that our housing calculations and capacity did not appear to be adequate. Their proposed resolution for that as well, you know, if what you do satisfies the hearings board then we'll be happy to. So we're looking at housing according to what both agencies have said. And also employment capacity. They called out the fact that our land use element showed county wide employment capacity deficit, and this was especially noticeable at that time in the Silverdale Regional Center and the Puget Sound Industrial Center and another unincorporated UGA's, especially Kingston, Port Orchard, and Paulsbo.

They also noted that while we had addressed air quality in our new climate change element and reducing greenhouse gases, we did not actually put that in our transportation element. That according to the Growth Management Act, that is where it is supposed to go or where a a policy addressing air quality and greenhouse gas reduction should go. So they left it to us if we wanted to move it from climate change or if we wanted to add additional policies that might be more related to transportation in our transportation element. But either way, something's gotta go in transportation. And so we are required to address the deficiencies identified by the PSRC by next June, 06/30/2026.

We were given a very short time frame from the hearings board in terms of how long it takes to go through the public process to satisfy the remand concerns. Those have to be adopted by 02/04/2026. And so that's why I just came to you a few weeks ago, with the briefing, and here we're already back with the work study, with proposed amendments. So it is a very compressed timeline. The draft amendments were released to the public, and a CEPA determination, based on the EIS for the comprehensive plan was done on the same day.

That was published on November 10. And comments received on the draft amendments from the public or on the CEPA D and S by December 1 will be shared with you at our next meeting on December 2. So to summarize the corrective actions, and then we can go into to more detail on the amendments individually if if you'd like to do that. For wildfire risk and planning, we have proposed amendments to the land use and transportation element, and these are in attachment a in your packet. So for wildfire planning and evacuation, we created entirely new goals, policies, and strategies to address wildfire evacuation, reduction of risk for new development, and how we would be handling interagency coordination.

One thing that we discussed at length, and there is no real way to do that in here in a comprehensive plan, is to designate permanent evacuation routes because we don't know where an emergency is going to happen. We don't know what nature that emergency will take, and so you can't say that this is always the emergency evacuation route because maybe your emergency is on that route. So it doesn't really make sense to adopt static maps into the comprehensive plan. What we do commit to is that we we have a process when for responding to emergencies, for designating emergency evacuation routes based on the actual emergency at hand, and for directing people to take those routes, for getting them to shelters, or for other ways to leave the area of danger. So that is something that we just wanted to make clear that even though there are no maps being adopted, we do understand the necessity of establishing evacuation routes during any type of natural disaster or other emergency situation.

Air quality. We had just put those those new the the new goal policies and strategies for greenhouse gas reduction and air quality maintenance into the climate change element. And we felt that since those were targeted towards the purpose of that element, we would rather put some new language into the transportation element that is targeted more towards transportation and how it affects greenhouse gas and how we can work within the transportation area of planning to support what's in the climate change element. We made it pretty simple to be compliant with the state law requirement that we will be reducing air pollutants. We will meet required federal and state air quality standards.

We will attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air toxics in our transportation planning, and that we will evaluate our various capital improvement projects for impacts to air quality. Housing and employment. Oh, boy. These required a lot of calculation. Cindy Reed, our GIS analyst, has been fantastic in going back through the land capacity analysis that was done for the comprehensive plan and looking at how we came up with our housing and employment capacities.

Speaking of housing first, Cindy went back and looked at everything that we had done to come up with housing both overall capacity and then by income groups. She noted that one thing we had not had not done was to do a reduction factor for or an adequate reduction factor for infill projects. So let's say in Downtown Silverdale, when you're doing a redevelopment, maybe it's a teardown or a rebuild or it's something that's been underutilized, but all of the utilities are present. You've got your sidewalks and your access. We were applying a standard 20% reduction for right of way across the board.

So that would have been for undeveloped rural lots and infill lots in UGA's. So talking with our transportation planning staff about right of way reduction, we took that down to 5% for those types of infill lots. And she did a complete reanalysis of all those parcels in our UGA. So that really helped us a lot. That is reasonable. It's defensible. And it brings us where we need to be for Silverdale and for the Puget Sound Industrial Center. We have not been able to completely excuse me, I'm sorry, I'm talking about employment. I should not have done that. I got off.

Sorry. Let me just talk about employment first since I'm already talking about employment. I apologize. Yes. So we did get down to 5% reduction for infill properties for employment.

That does help us for Silverdale and the PSIC. It does not get us where we should be quite for Kingston, which is a little over 500 short, 500 for our employment target, and then a little bit for Paulsboe and Port Orchard. We contacted the PSRC about this and we said, you know, we've done our best. We're not trying to push the envelope here to come up with some really obscure way of calculating our our employment capacity that we can't defend. We have to say it with a straight face.

And so we're not quite there. We don't have the time at this point to go through any type of rezoning exercise, up zoning, amending our development regulations to try to get more capacity into certain areas. We really have only have time to work with the methodology itself. And so the PSRC was understanding of that. They understand that we're on a short time frame with the remand.

They did say that, okay, so you've made significant progress, and that's great, and we will accept that if that's what you submit for your employment capacity, those revisions, as long as you're committing that in your near term work plan you will look at other options to completely resolve that issue and to have adequate capacity across all of your UGA's. So that's where we are with that. We're not quite there. We're going to have to do some additional work in future, more extensive than what we've done so far. But we're in a good place. We're getting there. And the PSRC is okay with our progress.

Just as a follow on question, can you please explain to me how you can predict future employment capacity in any way? What's the process that you use?

So just to make sure we're all talking about the same thing, employment capacity is creating the situation where development could take place or where employment could be established. So having sufficient commercial and industrial land, and then there's a methodology to calculate what we could develop on that property, how many square feet, how much you have to take away for parking spaces, other infrastructure, how high can you go according to the zoning, things like that. So we can't we can't make a business come in. We can't make anybody establish their commercial operations somewhere, but we can provide the situation for it to happen if they want to locate there. So we just have to show that we have sufficient land available for commercial and industrial development for anything that employs people.

But how does that get to capacity? 500, 600 people. How does that get to capacity?

So let's say that you have a commercial building, and I'm just going to make this up because I can't do it off top of my head. Let's say that it's 50,000 square feet. There are methodologies that are established, and we don't make them up. These are often in the transportation engineers' guidelines for how many trips are generated. We look at how many people generally per square foot employees occupy a space.

It's different for different types of commercial activity. So if you have a 10,000 square foot building, I'm making this up, you we would generally expect to see 200 employees. And that's how we do it. We can't guarantee it's going to happen. You might put a building in there and only have 10 employees, but we've created in theory, in concept, the capacity for that on this particular area of land. Does that help at all or am I making it more confusing?

No. Okay.

So can I maybe you're asking a different question than we're answering? The office the State Office of Financial Management comes up with the methodology. They developed the methodology. I don't know if they use a contractor or if it's developed in house, but they establish a methodology that then tells us what our population growth is going to be looking like. And they've been pretty accurate over the years with that. But they also do the same with employment capacity. What that methodology actually is, I couldn't tell you. It's some sort of dark magic the state has.

Well, I'm trying to get some of the curtain lifted here.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how they come to their numbers, but they basically tell us these are the number of people you need to accommodate, and these are the number of jobs you need to accommodate when we when we do our comprehensive planning. And, you know, they've been pretty accurate. They haven't always you know, the employment forecasting is new. But with population forecasting, they've been pretty pretty accurate over the years. So I don't know how they get

But are are they saying that we don't have enough industrial capacity? We don't have enough room for industry to grow? What are they trying to say that we don't we didn't do enough employment capacity?

So they're saying that and these targets are established for us by the PSRC and distributed throughout the region, that if they're saying that we have to take I'm going to make this up 15,000 jobs over our twenty year planning period, we need to show that we have enough land to accommodate that number of jobs, new jobs. And so we have to show how we have sufficient commercial and industrial land, and how those can be developed to, in theory, have the type of development or businesses located there that could employ that number of people at minimum. It sounds like I may not be understanding are you asking how the targets get established by the PSRC or

I'll accept that they have targets. How do we go about fulfilling them? One question would be, our major employer here is shipyard. Do we take credit for that?

My understanding is that we aren't looking at federal jobs.

So we don't count our biggest and best employer in the county?

It's an issue because we can't say what the federal government is going to do. We don't

Well, we know they're

going to

spend $20,000,000,000 here in next ten to fifteen years. They told us that.

The thing is that we don't regulate the development of the Navy's property. I'm just trying to get can't done to tell them to do do anything. Can't look at that. We have no regulatory authority over the Navy and federal land.

I'm saying can we take credit for it?

No. In our comprehensive planning, we it's a dark spot that we don't go into with respect to military installations and policies that could impact them. They have they have no way locally. And so they're kind of left alone during a comprehensive planning process. They recognize that they exist.

But, you know, I think maybe to your point, we need more capacity. We need more lands for capacity that Carrie was talking about. And that's been a challenge. So I think if you've been paying attention to what the feds are doing in preparation for their projects, they've been grabbing up a lot of leasehold land interest. And so that's making it difficult for other people who want to find their own lay down yards or whatever for their own businesses. But I think the good news here is that we're going to be creating more capacity for employment.

I I just look at a company like Safe Boats, which is an industrial activity. Yeah. Marine related, it's looking at the airport. We don't have a lot of land allocated or designated to do maritime industrial things in our gross planning.

And that's something that we may be able to address in future when we have more time to do it. Because of the short time frame that we're working under, we couldn't get into potential rezoning or upzoning of property, re designating anything on the land use map. We had to work strictly within the methodology. And that can only compensate so far. But I do hear you. Fundamentally, comes down to we have a lack of land that is available for those types of uses. And that's something that we would be working on in the near future.

I think the only industrial capacity land that we've got not designated is Port Gamble, and they're not going to build new industry out there for maritime.

Right.

Open. Question for you. The just so I can understand table four in particular, like, Kingston, for example, is a negative 513. Is that representative of 513 individual jobs that they're short, like available jobs? I'm reading that proper.

Yes. Okay. The changes that you see, this is table four on page four. Yes, ma'am. In those red ones, that's where it shows that we still have a deficit. So it's Paulsbo, Port Orchard, Central Kitsap excuse me, Paulsbo, Port Orchard, Kingston. Kingston, as you can see, is the largest gap that we have. It's better than it was. It used to be five forty two. For Port Orchard, it was three twenty two. So we've got that down considerably. But we still need to show over the long term how we're going to accommodate all of

it. Yeah. Just a thought, and I think maybe maybe to commissioner Beams' thought processes. I imagine that all counties have this this oversight. Right?

When it comes to their comprehensive plan, have to meet certain metrics and show that they're meeting these employment targets and things of that nature. However, this is very tough because in reality, we have far surpassed these employment targets. There's 15,000 shipyard workers that live in Kitsap County and that pay taxes and own homes and are in this County. Really Kitsap County going into this whole comprehensive plan process is at a deficit. We don't get to claim any military folks or any DOD folks when we actually are far 15,000 employees.

That was a lot of human beings when it shows that we're having a deaf we're actually in a net surplus jobs overall for the county from what I can read from this table. But that's does that we get no consideration, not even an asterisk next to Kitsap County's name saying, hey. We we took 15,000 jobs from this report. So you're gonna have to not only meet our expectations, but you have to best it by an additional 15,000 bodies.

Those are really good points.

Those are really tough to do to our county. Yeah. And but that's part of what makes our county so great is our military and our DOD and having the the opportunity for employment that way. But my goodness, what an insurmountable task to try and meet those targets when we have a huge you pretty much the whole city of Port Orchard doesn't get consideration. You know, that's just really tough. So I don't know if you're tracking that all that way. Yeah. Commissioner Beam, I'm so sorry, but that's what I'm gleaning from this. Am I

Well, and just to distinguish, when you say pretty much the whole city of Port Orchard isn't being considered, so it's not about it's not at all about where the employees live.

No. Population size. I'm so sorry. I was at 15,000 shipyard workers with 18,000 people in Port Orchard. So I was just saying we have a whole city not in consideration if you just go population wise, not where they live.

Right. Because we can only look at the land itself and plan for the capacity to accommodate commercial and industrial growth. And as as we've been discussing, we have no control over the federal land. And so we can't say what they will or will not do there or if there have any jobs for you know, any job growth there at all. We simply don't have the capacity to consider that. But your points are are are well made.

Yeah. I'm sure that I'm speaking to you know what I mean? Speaking to the crowd here. But that's very frustrating. Yeah.

And it looks like Rafe has something to say, but I'll just add that this was a new process, a new element to our comprehensive planning. And so our reaction was we got to do what they're telling us to do. We didn't have a lot of forethought and time to be able to look at this in the detail that I think you're suggesting rightly so that is needed. And so it is definitely something that should be talked about and Rafe coming from that side of the industry probably has more to add.

Yeah. Good evening, commissioners. Thanks for coming tonight. I will just say that if you look at remember that the number is growth. Right? We're talking growth. We're not talking current capacity. We're not talking what we provide now. It's how much can we grow. And so, yeah, we had a slight disadvantage because we can't use, we can't create more, increased height development on the base.

Sure. That's land we can't, we don't authorize. But we also don't have control over Bremerton. We also don't have control over Porto, what the city of Port Orchard does, but we don't count those employments towards our numbers. Right? So if you think of the base, even if we could, we probably wouldn't count the shipyard because Bremerton would get credit for those, not Kitsap County. Maybe we would for sub base Bupa Banger because that's probably county, right, surrounded by county, there's no city. But Bremerton, would not. If anybody's arguing about the military base and not being able to count the employment on naval base Bremerton, it's probably Bremerton. It's not Kitsap County.

That would be my point to that comment. And I'm coming from that side. I understand the the whole military piece of it, but sorry. And and just commissioner, to chair, to to your point about the calculations and how we calculate it, it's really just when we allocate land, so if we allocate 10 acres of commercial land, we now can put a 100,000 square feet of development. I'm just randomly saying numbers.

When that 100,000 square feet comes, there's a number that says for every 100 square feet you get one employment. So the calculations for how we figure it out, how we provide that capacity is we create land which then there's a number which shows how many square feet of development can happen and then there's a number that is generated for us that says how many employments, how many bodies of employment or how many jobs that creates. Right? So it all starts with the land you provide and then there's a calculation that determines how much you can build on it which determines how many people that comes with. And I know that's different.

Right? I know one company comes in and it's AI driven and that provides zero jobs. Right? And then another one comes in where it's all about, you know, Amazon which has tons of workers and it provides maybe more density than our calculations. But it's an average that that is provided to us from the state.

So capacity is really just a numbers game?

It's it is. It absolutely is. Right? So to get the to increase capacity, what we did is we took we were reducing our acreage, our developable land by 20% based on what Carrie had described. Right? And we went back and said, well, that's probably, we were overestimating. We only need to reduce that by 5%. So just by just one little switch of a number from 20% of reduction of our lands to five, we provided almost all the capacity we needed. We're short still and that's where we gotta work with the different jurisdictions within the county, the cities for example to reallocate some of those employment targets. Because those employment numbers are given to us by the countywide planning policies.

So we have to work. We can't just say Porto or we can't just say Bremerton, you take those jobs from us. We have to work with Bremerton who owns those GGAs or or work with other GGAs to move those jobs. Because Bremerton right now has an overcapacity. Right? Overall, we have more employment than we need. But in those spot zones, we are short. So in in Kingston, we are short. We have to work. We can't just reallocate that job to the Bremerton UGA without working with the city of Bremerton to say we're gonna move those job capacities to you because you have an overage and we're short in Kingston. And that's why we can't get there from here because that requires a process that isn't gonna happen in the next six months. Conversations have already started on that. It's not gonna happen in the next six months.

So to that to that point, when will some of those reallocations happen or rezoning for example in Kingston to get those job locations available? I mean, we just did the whole comprehensive plan. We don't have the sites, right?

So we because we have capacity across the county, and and Scott you can jump in if I'm misspeaking, but the the we have to work with KARCC and the countywide planning policies to reallocate that employment to say the Bremerton UGA where we have extra capacity. But we can't do that on our own. So the capacity the employment capacity exists in the county. It's just not where the planning policies that were created, we don't have that capacity there. We we we don't assess that it makes sense to just turn a bunch of residential land into commercial land.

We we could do that, but this doesn't make sense based on myriad of other factors. Right? What makes more sense is to say, have extra capacity in Bremerton. Let's just move those jobs from potentially Kingston to Bremerton. But that requires working with the the cities that have that we work with with those developing those UGA's. Does that make sense?

I hear that, but I believe that Kingston needs more jobs as well. The the just moving the jobs somewhere else doesn't help

Sure.

That part of our county.

Yeah. But and but there is there is significant growth in Kingston. It's just that the targets that they set were were a little bit to just too too crazy. Right? For lack of a better term. So they're there. Those jobs are we're planning for a significant amount of growth. But I think those those initial estimates were way too high and that's what we're finding.

So

in looking at the charts on table four, we're talking about growth and employment. Are the listed Bremerton, Silverdale, Kingston, Paulsbo, is that incorporating the cities of Paulsbo, city of Bremerton?

No. It's not. It's the unincorporated Unincorporated.

Right. Unincorporated only.

The UJs that surround the city.

Okay. Thank you.

Remote jobs are not captured, correct, in any of this, as far as for employment?

No. Not not as part of a formal calculation, the way we're required to do it.

Yeah. Okay. That doesn't seem to take into account the new world reality we live in. Because if you put in a big box store or something like that, I mean, you're not I just I mean, you can't guarantee this is not going be shuttered next year because, you know, some of their change in society happens or with the economy. So it's interesting.

I just wanted to clarify. What you're doing is looking to make sure that you have either zoned correctly or just provided the opportunity for jobs to come in. That's the whole goal, right?

That's correct. We have to set the stage.

Exactly. And so the not counting other jobs doesn't actually hurt us because we're just trying to set the stage so that we could grow. But if the economy didn't, then they wouldn't. We're just setting the stage, guess was my point.

That's right. Based on the estimates were given of how much growth we should expect, we have to show that we can accommodate it. Exactly. Don't know that it's going to happen.

It may not happen. Right. The goal is for us to make sure that we're ready if it happens and that we've set that stage up.

Right. And one of the differences between calculating capacity for housing and employment, housing we're looking at income and the different income categories. We're not tied to saying it all has to be evenly distributed, but for employment we are. We have to show not just that we have overall capacity in the county, but that it's distributed amongst all of the different UGA's as it's assigned to us. So it's a little harder to meet that geographic requirement.

But again, we're setting

the stage.

That's right. Developing the capacity. Other comments?

I can understand and respect that there's certain guidelines and things that have to meet whether it's five years, ten years, certain plans that have to be adopted and amended. I think ultimately with many of them and especially in this case, it's to set a framework of a goal to try and achieve or anticipate for growth or advancement. Right? In this, does the PSRC or the county more does the PSRC outline actually not just capacity, but employment with that? Not just, hey.

We have, you know, 1,583 jobs or open availability for employment capacity, but maybe not the jobs to fill that. Do they have some kind of metric as far as converting that capacity to actually incorporating those jobs?

I'm not sure if I quite understand the question. Like, when we look down if we look on table four, I'm just gonna look at the last figure there, 1,238. That's actually excess capacity

Correct.

That we have. It's just and it's not distributed as we Correct. Should have it distributed. But we have the overall capacity for job growth in Kitsap. The targets that the target that's assigned to us for overall growth.

Right. So And that's I guess that's potential, whether it's undeveloped land or maybe it's vacant. I guess maybe not sure if it's vacant warehouses or I mean, there's there's capacity to have the jobs. But then converting that to saying we are actually by 2024 or when we need to what this capacity is looking at as far as a growth target. We've actually added 1,238 actually employees or actual jobs.

It seems kind of I guess it seems kind of empty that we have capacity. Sure. We can say and rezone and do many of these things, but are we actually, as a municipality, incentivizing whether it's actual commercial development, whether it's small scale of issuing CFOs. I mean, getting those jobs to come, not just saying that, well, we've rezoned and now we have more capacity for whether it's industrial or commercial. But actually, what I guess, what's the next step?

Does p r s PSRC outlined that? Does the county have an idea about, okay, maybe we're gonna rezone or look at parcels or reduce setbacks or certain things, right, to allow to increase our capacity, but then what are we gonna actually do to follow through on that so that we do add the jobs needed? Do we do add the five thirteen jobs that we need in Kingston? We do add those to meet our population growth.

So I think what you're asking is more about economic development.

Correct.

Are we marrying what we're trying to do here in planning providing capacity with actually getting that growth to come in to get that economic benefit and boost? We have some things in our comprehensive plan that speak towards encouraging small business, to simplifying development regulations, to encouraging growth in certain areas that's well served by infrastructure and transportation. Scott may want to speak more

I just was going to add a good example. I was going to say our comp plan guides us in trying to promote economic development. And probably the best example that I can think of is promoting Silverdale as a regional medical destination. And so those there's policies and strategies in our comp plan that would really help kind of blow up the medical field in Silverdale if we could enact those somewhat rapidly or over time.

Any

other questions?

I don't have a question related to this. I have a question related on another topic if we're ready to move on.

We're getting close. Let's finish this one out first. I have two questions. The appeals process for the comp plan has been pretty much shaded from us. We we don't know. Is there where do you go to look at what were the appeals and what were done to the comp plan?

You're asking about looking at the actual appeal documents?

Not necessarily. I'm saying what were the appeals, who made the appeals, and what happened to them.

Okay. For our comprehensive plan, it was appealed to the Growth Management Hearings Board by several parties. And the hearings board

We don't need to necessarily go into that all now. But is there some place that we can get that kind of information?

It's in your packet. If you want to look at the remand response from the hearings board.

But that's only the five things. There more appeals than that.

There were. The hearings board combined them. They heard them in a consolidated hearing. And they dismissed some of those issues.

How do we see that? Where do we go to look?

I think the hearings board website would probably be the best way to look at everything. Everything that was under the appeal. Because not all of those carried forward into the remand itself. We were only remanded on these narrow issues.

I understand, but I was saying the whole process has been sort of cloaked. How do we get into finding out what that's who said what to whom when?

And you're specifically interested in the orders of dismissal. It sounds like.

Yeah. Okay. The other thing is that we're going to go out of here and we're going go to a public hearing next for the next meeting. Do we have a work study scheduled so that we can take what the public said and put it back into the process? Do we have a work study scheduled post This is

the work study tonight. Public comment?

Post public comment, I think we need a work study.

We don't have time.

How do we get the public comments to the Planning Commission so that we can take action? We don't take action in a public hearing.

You will be provided with all of the public comments.

We can discuss this later.

Point of order, chair, there will be a deliberations meeting and findings of fact meeting following the public hearing. That's what I'm asking for. At that point, the planning commission can provide feedback based on the

public That's what I'm

asking for.

Any other comments for the work study?

Clara, I apologize. Would you just remind the room what the dates are of the deliberations and finding a fax just since it was mentioned? I apologize.

Yeah. Give me just one moment.

Yeah. Or Scott or Carrie, if either of you know.

I I can do that. There are a couple of dates that have not yet been scheduled with the board, but I can talk about the planning commission. Okay. The planning commission public hearing is scheduled for December 2. Deliberations and findings of fact for December 9, And then then the board takes over in late December.

Oh. How do we get from December to the ninth? Oh, we weren't informed of a December 9 planning commission meeting.

Yeah. And I will note, we are still, you know, kind of trying to fit it in within the Okay. Schedule. And so due to the tight timelines, we're discussing having a meeting, holding a special meeting on December 9, but we will provide noticing for that once that's confirmed.

Okay. I have Yeah. Put in

the cart before the horse. Okay. You. Apologize. Thank you, guys.

Yeah. But, yeah, tentatively, deliberations are scheduled for December 9, and keep an eye out for noticing for that.

Andrea? Thank

you. I just I had a few comments on the proposed revisions to the comprehensive plan, if we could go there. That sound good? Okay. Great.

Thank you. So I'm looking at item b, air quality under the transportation element. And I just had maybe two recommendations, I guess. So this I'm mainly speaking from I I used to work a lot in, you know, air air quality, traffic pollutants, and all that all that jazz. And the the language is actually very, very tricky, and so I just had a suggestion around so if you look at, for example, transportation policy 11 .one, it talks about ensuring federal and state air quality standards are met and reduce reduce emission of air toxin and greenhouse gases.

So my my recommendation would be, if possible, to potentially just add some nuance to that language just because there there are a lot of differences, especially as it relates to health impacts between various types of traffic related sources of, you know, gases, particulates, ultrafine particulates, and then air toxics on top of that. And so even just adding something like other mobile sources of pollution, like criteria air pollutants, or just digging into that language a little bit more so that it's, I think, matching the goal or the goal around protecting public health and the environment, if that makes sense.

It does. And, commissioner, would you be willing to work with us directly on crafting some language that could Absolutely.

Yeah. And I could I could send along a few studies and that kind of thing. There still is really great information provided by EPA and, you know, the National Air Quality Standards and all that all that good stuff. And then my second recommendation would be to so there's the, you know, the reduction of the pollutants themselves, you know, traffic related sources. But then I think we could potentially add an additional strategy that talks about reducing exposure.

So that could be, like, human exposure, right, to roadside or traffic related, you know, air pollutants. So they they kind of go hand in hand. So, you know, you I think, yeah, both provide co benefits, but one is a little bit more to that human oriented, element that's you might not be as closely close to that source of that harmful pollutant.

Thank you. And if you can provide some draft language and the studies that you were referencing, that would be super helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.

Any others? Last chance? Seeing no further comments, we will close the work study for the remand, which brings us to general comments.

I

just like to add a little bit on the BLA proposal to you and give you some background. And I'll I'm introducing myself because I'll be here on the ninth with I didn't bring any paperwork with it. But, just to give you some insight, 1969, Fran Rutherford was the assessor, and he hired me as the county map draftsman. And I was given two major functions, but the second one affects BLAs. So why they have so many on record like this?

Most I was instructed to take every legal description with every parcel in Kitsap County section by section and redraw the maps. Now if you're not familiar with meats and bounds descriptions, that was the common way that property was described back then. It used creeks, monuments, fence posts, all kinds. I'll make one up for you real quick. John Smith's Northwest Corner at the fence post as the starting point.

Go about 600 feet till you hit the monument, which was a group of rocks with a stake somebody did. Turn south, go 450 about feet till you hit the middle of the creek. Follow the middle of the creek back to hit the x access road back to the point at beginning. So you can see it was all done by physical and not by exact. So my job was to come in and put government survey legal descriptions on each one so that I, section township range, quarter, parcel index numbers.

So it was pretty on paper when I was done, but it did not match reality. People had built fences that they are in homes and barns, and that's just the history of Kitsap is where we're at here now. So, I'll go into more later. But, I mean, the fence post is gone. The marker was cleared off the creek.

It changed course because of flood and then the access road got washed out. So a new access road was put in. I mean, just all the physical attributes were gone. And my job was to clean up every parcel in Kitsap County so that it looked pretty on paper, but not reality. A little side note, I was none of the property owners were ever notified that their lines had changed up sometimes twenty, thirty feet.

Okay? Or the that their legal descriptions were changed. How do I know that? I was the only one in my department, and I was the only one who knew which boundaries needed to be changed to get it all conforming on paper. So a little background, but, I would like to jump over to a staff's presentation to you. This is the third or fourth time, Scott, this subject has come up.

Second in twenty five years.

Okay. It's it's it's as you can see from my example why it's come. But I think that I do not agree with it at all for a lot of reasons, and I'll bring them up when I'm more prepared. But I think, Carrie, you told me you have 31 instances that you didn't think conformed that were abused, let's say?

I I think you're talking about the report that I gave you that was provided by

the current planning partners. Of

Yeah.

People that had abused or not done it correctly.

That's the report that was prepared by current planning, which may or may not have all of them. It's the it's just what they've documented

so far. You gave me was 31.

Okay.

So I wanted to just add this to you using the figures that I have, which is 31. I had the auditors pick up, and they would only go back twenty five years. I would like to have had 50 for different reasons, but twenty five years. 01/01/2000 until today, there's been 6,872 boundary line adjustments in Kitsap County. And when I look at 31 that weren't done correctly, I'm less than one half of 1%, and we needed an ordinance to cover that.

It doesn't it doesn't fit. I mean, do the math. That's approximately 261 a year. You've got 240 workdays, five days a week. That's over one a day since 2000 01/01/2000.

And we wanna put that under and why do the surveyors not like this? Because they know that applying this for a permit in DCD is a time killer. Now with all due respect, and this is opinion, kids have kinda missed the boat a long time ago. 1977 is when DCD was introduced and accepted here. That's about fifty, fifty five years ago.

And they were to monitor building and land use. Well, in fifty years, with all due respect to everybody that works there, not as a negative, just as my opinion, What's the biggest complaint you have now? The time it takes to get approvals. And you wanna throw something that is used on a daily basis back over into that arena, it just don't make sense to me. And that's why the surveyors are against it.

I need you to wrap up here.

Pardon me? I need you to wrap up here.

Okay. I I get to talking, and I apologize. So anyway, my biggest thing is to give you backup, information of why we're in this with Kitsap County. It was, all because of the legal descriptions and history of how they evolved. I'll see you next time.

Thank you very much.

Thank

you. Any comments from the online?

There are no public comments online.

Any other comments in the room?

Actually, apologies, there's a hand up now.

Okay.

Hi. It's David Overton. Can you hear me?

Yes, sir.

Hi. I'm a property owner in South Kitsap. We're a multigenerational company. We had some rezones in front of the county earlier that were not accepted. We offered at the end of the process to rezone property to industrial to help the county in its need to find additional properties.

This was contiguous to the city of Bremerton. So we're still going to be working on that in a go forward basis to help the county achieve its goals under the Growth Management Act and with PSRC. Additionally, on the Boundary Line Adjustment Ordinance, I think the testimony that you just got is very poignant. We've owned property in this county since the early nineteen hundreds, and we've been through multiple iterations of planning and surveying. And we need an ordinance that is a daily work, for very old county documents that were never done comprehensively.

To restrict it to what would amount to a permit will be very difficult. Oftentimes, these boundary line adjustments need to happen to facilitate a closing, and I'm very concerned that this would not be a timely manner and would take up an inordinate amount of the county's time to settle very basic issues. So we'll provide some written commentary on this as well and show up at your next round of meetings. Thank you very much for addressing these issues.

Thank you. No other comments?

No other comments online.

With that, I officially close second general comment period, which brings us to for the good of the order. Anybody?

Sir? Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Thanks. Thank you. No other good of the order? Andrea, anything? We declare this meeting closed.