Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Are we, do we have our online guests muted? I'm sorry. I thought I clicked it and I did not. We're working now. Okay. Commissioner Bartlett. We cannot hear commissioner Bartlett yet. How about commissioner Fishburne? Michelle Fishburne, can you hear us?

I can't read that. Oh, I wonder.

My mic won't turn on.

Twice if you're in trouble.

Today's presentations are mainly informational, aren't they? Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

And Commissioner Bumker Barger is here as well in the courtroom. Hello, apologies.

I had a house showing and it went a little long. So that's all right.

Well, we do have some commissioners online. We have some technical difficulties with them. But as that works itself out, we'll bring you guys on. And if you have something that you need to tell us beforehand, go ahead and raise your arms wildly and send somebody a text.

Use the raise hand feature and they'll go to the top of the stack. Yeah.

All right, well, we're going to move along with our meeting and look at our agenda for tonight. And with that, I would entertain any motions.

Make a motion to amend the agenda to approve meeting minutes for May 6th and May 20th versus what's on the agenda is February 18th.

Hey, it's been moved and seconded to approve our amended agenda. All in favor say aye. Aye. Our agenda is approved. All right, with that, we're going to move on to the public communication portion of our meeting. We do have some general speaking guidelines. Please introduce yourself, including those who reside in the community. I'm sorry. Hello? All right, we have Commissioner Pessinger working now.

I've been working the whole time. I could hear you loud and clear. I just never heard you call my name.

You were the first I called.

Oh, well, then I didn't hear you at the start, I guess. So I just heard a motion that said something about the agenda and then it said something about changing the date of the minutes, but did we just approve the minutes?

No, we haven't approved the minutes yet.

Okay. And did we do introductions or are we jumping to public comment?

crack and do online introductions right now. So how about you introduce yourself? Commissioner Pessinger.

This is commissioner Pessinger from district five.

And we're going to try again with, uh, commissioner Bartlett. Commissioner Bartlett, can you hear us?

I can hear you guys just fine. Um, this is, uh, commissioner Bartlett from district five. Uh, yeah.

Okay. Commissioner Kaiser.

Hi, I'm Sandy Kaiser. I live in and serve District 3.

And then Commissioner Fishburne. And we'll try Commissioner Flores.

Yep, Lola Flores, District 3.

Thank you. Commissioner Fishburne, we're hoping that you're able to hear us. We are going to move on to the public communication portion though with some general guidelines. We've already approved them.

The change in the agenda for the two dates.

Okay, yeah. We can do the approval of the meeting minutes from May 6th and May 20th. Has everybody had an opportunity? We've got to do them one at a time. Has everybody had an opportunity to look over the meeting minutes from May 6th?

Yeah, I feel like a lot of our conversation got kind of glazed over.

Well, that's why the audio is the official record. Good meeting minutes are truncated. With that, I would entertain. Go ahead, Commissioner.

I have a comment about that. Okay. And I think this is actually for the May 20th meeting, but there's a lot of things that are not glazed over. There's a lot of detail in there. And then there's very explicitly several comments that were just totally left out. And it seems either we're going to include comments made by commissioners or we're not, but we can't do half and half.

Do we have any, do we want to make that discussion out of this or.

There's a preference from the Planning Commission. My suggestion, it's really hard to try and capture everything really well, especially when we have a reporting for the record. But if there's direction from the Planning Commission on which way you would like the pendulum on the notes to swing, I think that could be useful.

I do know that some of the comments that I had made was not in the

Yeah. The entire, well, that very large discussion we had was summarized with the commission discussed further on G habitats and their relationships with UGA versus rural County.

I guess my, my preference is like more of a summary is fine. Like, I mean, like that, like that was, uh, I think that that was a little bit too much of a summary, but I definitely understand that there's going to be some some nuance there.

Go ahead. Two things one looking at the meeting minutes for May 20 page two line 20. And it says tree protection standards will use density and credits to assess protection period. Then it says the wireless chapter updated standards in 2025 with a focus on smaller facilities period. Then it says commissioner posting your voice is concerned about the current protection standards should have more commissioner Bartlett agreed and asked what reassessing would look like. And so I, I don't, I thought my comments were about tree protections. Um, but I can't tell with this. Merging of wireless chapter stuff. Is it tree protections in wireless chapter? I don't remember that. Or is tree protection standards separate? And this just was an accident.

All of those would fall under the joint codes and things that we, I think, as a planning commission, you all have discussed and have dealt with in the past. So I think it was, my guess is the intention is to highlight the things that a joint code would need to cover.

My biggest complaint, and overall I'm actually appreciative of the more detailed notes that we have here, but it's a little odd that we have a huge amount of notes on what the staff presentation was when there's literally like PowerPoint slides of the staff presentation already. So if we want to do shortened things, I would definitely remove all of the staff presentation summaries.

Okay, so moving forward, you'd like to see less on staff presentations and more on commission discussion.

And consistency. If we're going to include two commissioners' comments verbatim and we're just going to ignore two other commissioners' comments, that doesn't seem appropriate. I think let's choose one or the other. I would lean towards let's include all commissioner comments that are relevant to the topics because I think that's important for the public records.

I agree.

Well, that direction has been given to staff.

I mean, the only comment I'd make is that we've always consistently accepted the audio as the official meeting record, not the written audio. document and to summarize the written comments in the meeting minutes, the written meeting minutes, I think is more appropriate than doing a verbatim resuscitation of what was said. That can be very long and very lengthy. I agree with Commissioner Tessinger in that you shouldn't have comments from one or two commissioners and not from others, but they should just be a summary of comments made, not verbatim comments.

I'm good with that.

Be my suggestion. Like, for example, when we're thinking about the record, when we use the record, we don't use the meeting minutes at all. We will have the we'll have like professional transcription of a meeting and all of everything. Everybody said exactly when we're using it for actually the record, like if somebody is appealing a policy decision.

And I love that, but I care the most about the public record for the public. And I know how the public uses it.

All right. Well, with that, I would entertain a motion to honor May 6th meeting minutes.

I think we, according to the minute, May 20th minutes, we've already approved those.

No.

That's what it says in these. Wednesday, May 20th, we approved, moved to approve.

We moved to approve May 6th. However, there were two abstentions and there were only four people present. So it didn't meet the criteria for approval.

So we need to approve both. We need to approve both then. The 6th and the 20th. But we're going to do them one at a time. So I would entertain a motion for the May 6th meeting minutes.

Move to approve the May 6th meeting minutes and accept the audio as an official record.

Second. It's been moved and seconded. Is there any further discussion specific to the May 6th meeting minutes? All those in favor of approving the May 6th meeting minutes and accepting the audio as the official record, say aye. Aye. Motion carries. I now entertain a motion on the May 20th meeting minutes.

Move to approve the May 20th minutes and accept the audio as official record.

Is there a second to accept the May 20th meeting minutes?

I'll second that. I wasn't here, so I'm going to have to abstain from that vote.

I'll second. It sounded like Commissioner Bartlett seconded. What's that? Commissioner Bartlett seconded. Oh, you're seconding them? All right. Is there any further discussion on the May 20th meeting minutes? Yes.

Yeah.

Okay, we'll start.

Go ahead.

We need to change. Under the approval of the minutes that that did not according to this that passed in that unanimously. From a sick the approval of the May 6 minutes asked unanimously is what the minutes say.

Update that says.

There were there were 4, 4, and 2 abstentions so it was kicked to the this meeting to approve those.

Okay. put that update in. Commissioner Pestinger, did you have anything for the May 20th minutes?

Yeah. One of the comments that was left out was from Commissioner Bumbarder about feeling like we're not really being listened to as planning commissioners and it felt like the staff and maybe even the county commissioners already had made up their mind of what they wanted to do on this particular topic and Um, I can understand that's a little sensitive and makes people feel not great to make that public. Um, but I would say it's also important. I backed that up because I felt the same way that commissioner bombarder described. And, um, I would say, okay, fine. Let's leave it out of the minutes right now. But I would also say if that pattern continues the next time, uh, I will ask for it to be in the notes in the minutes.

Fair enough. Thank you, Commissioner Passinger. Any other comments on the May 20th meeting minutes? All those in favor of accepting the May 20th meeting minutes and accept the audio as the official meeting record, say aye.

Aye.

These minutes have been accepted. All right. We're going to move on to the Public communication portion of our agenda. I have some general guidelines here. Please introduce yourself, including the address you reside in the county. Please address the planning commission, not the audience or staff. The planning commission may not respond to public comments. Speakers are limited to a total of three minutes. The timer will show on one of the video screens to help keep track of time. meeting attendees cannot donate their speaking time to another person no comments that are lewd and offensive inflammatory hateful defamatory discriminatory in nature no comments that are commercial in nature all materials provided to the county may be subject release pursuant to the public records act remarks on projects that have already had a planning commission public hearing will be forwarded to the board of county commissioners for their consideration We're gonna start public comment here in the boardroom and up first will be Christy White.

My name is Christy White and I live in the Delphi Valley. Tonight you're gonna talk about wildlife. I'm gonna take this opportunity to talk about free canopy this evening. So that's what my comments are focused on regarding how the critical areas of Oregon ordinance works with the UGAs. I respectfully request that the commissioners ask staff to evaluate additional tree protection measures that can be applied to UGAs and the CAO in the development regulations. We've talked from the very beginning about how do we correlate all these regulations so they work together. The CAO protects wetlands, streams, steep slopes, and habitat areas. However, it does not function as an urban tree canopy preservation tool. Trees outside mapped critical areas can be removed with minimal protection, even though they provide stormwater interception, urban cooling and climate resilience, carbon storage, air quality benefits, wildlife habitat, and neighborhood character. The CAO update presents an opportunity to consider how critical area protections and UGA development regulations can work together to support environmental resilience. There's several jurisdictions, research I've done so far, and granted I'm not an expert, who have really effective and adaptable approaches. Portland, Oregon is one to look at. King County. Bellevue. Olympia. Lacey and Tumwater, then Hoover, Washington, and way out of state, but Austin, Texas has a very good ordinance that they have done for heritage communities. So I asked the Planning Commission to request that staff prepare a comparative analysis of these jurisdictions for tree protection and identify best practices that could be adopted to Thurston County's UGA and the CAO. Trees are a long-lived green infrastructure that provides significant public benefits and take decades to replace. A best practices review will help ensure Thurston County's environmental resilience and community livability for years to come. And you also receive this via email this afternoon.

So thank you. Thank you very much. Lynn Fitzhughes.

Restoring Earth Connection, Olympia, Washington. I would like to clarify some misleading things about tree policy that got said last meeting. First, to be clear, none of the three cities or county currently have a tree ordinance that protects the biggest trees, which from a climate perspective is what we really need. So the real question is, who will write one? Well, staff stated that the county's ordinance is 30 years old. That is true, but they also have a brand new 2023 tree ordinance that applies mainly to South County. It is the most current tree ordinance any of the four jurisdictions have. Lacey five years ago was going to weaken their tree ordinance and we fought them hard and they slightly improved it. Tumwater has been rewriting there since 2023. Olympia has a 30 year old tree fountain. The best item each had was brought forward to imply that we will fare much better if the city's right to code. In reality, they have much smaller staff than the county. As I explained last time, all currently have a floor method. A minimum number of trees were prior on a lot. But in the case of development, you can actually clear cut and put back saplings to meet the required number. Environmentally, this is a net loss. It will take 30 years for a sapling to become as effective as a 30-year-old tree it replaces in carbon drawdown pollution removal, and stormwater management. So giving authority for tree ordinances over to three groups who currently have no more protections for trees than a county does is an abdication of responsibility, especially since tree protections and planning make up 46% of Thurston County's climate mitigation plan. Why would that be given away to the cities? It was somehow implied last week that the county cannot afford to do this. Nope. No jurisdiction does enforcement, so putting that cost aside, the cost is writing the ordinance. You have 75% of the needed concepts in the new code you passed in 2023. The commissioners were crystal clear when the rocket was passed that they wanted staff time to work on this. It is not necessary for the county to get a whole grant like Tumwater who was starting from scratch. The staff time already is in the docket that can be applied to bringing these concepts over and addressing the adaptation for different size lots and some gaps. There is of course holding a public process but this is not some hugely expensive thing. It can be done as part of the subdivisions provisions that are occurring this year. You all started out last meeting very clear that you wanted tree protections. And then as several of you noted, you were told, not asked, and you were told a number of things that I think are inaccurate, that there is something better elsewhere and that the county cannot afford to do this work. Please change and retain control of trees for the county and the local agreements with the cities. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Rhonda Larson-Kramer.

Hi, my name is Rhonda Larson Kramer and I live at 1814 East Side Street Southeast in Olympia. I wanted to inform you of something I recently read regarding the economics of protected areas. It has been said that protected areas destroy rural economies and jobs and that the costs outweigh the benefits to humans. Research shows the opposite. Major protected areas foster more prosperous community or economics. This is based on tourism, recreation, real estate values and property tax revenue, skilled labor, and ecosystem services. Regarding recreation, rock climbers, cyclists, kayakers, anglers, hunters, and others spend billions across the US each year on things like gear and guides. Protected areas are the foundation that keeps this billion dollar recreation economy alive and growing. Data show that property values can increase by up to 10% near protected or conserved lands. Wealth from retirees helps boost the local economy and higher property values attract investors and create stronger municipal tax bases. This stimulates construction and infrastructure development, which creates additional jobs and economic growth. protected areas also help attract people and talent. A growing body of research shows that nature plays a major role in where skilled workers and businesses choose to locate. Regions with protected lands often see stronger growth in high skilled and knowledge sector jobs. This shift is known as amenity based development. Protected areas also deliver essential ecosystem services that underpin our economy and well-being. Federal research from Canada estimates that ecosystem services deliver trillions of dollars in benefits annually through services such as water filtration, blood control, sewage treatment naturally, and carbon storage. And these services save communities billions in infrastructure and disaster mitigation costs. They also support agriculture, fisheries, and overall environmental stability. Protecting these systems is one of the most cost-effective economic strategies available. Thanks.

Thank you very much. Betsy Norton?

Hi, Planning Commissioners. My name is Betsy Norton. I live in Olympia. In addition to the recommendations that the South Sound Bird Alliance gave you in terms of lists of special species of wildlife from U.S. Fish and Wildlife and also from WDFW, I discovered another site for WDFW that is Species and Habitats of Greatest Conservation Need. which has, they're going to be having a map, I guess, available soon that you can do on GIS. It's going to give you a list and I have in my comments the 132 animals they have on their list, but it includes candidate species and it sort of combines all those lists together. It might be something that's easier to use than going out to all these different areas. And it would allow you also to keep up with the latest updates to that list. The other thing they have on this site is recommendations about how to conserve the areas, what to do to make them better, what to do to maintain them and that kind of thing. And so I think that would be, it might be very useful for you guys to reference that. Secondly, I'd like to suggest a procedural change when you guys are doing permitting for development, which is that you do these assessments when you sit down on the pre-conference hearing with people and ask them to have their architects design around the environmental assets instead of the other way around so that they can do things like make things go up instead of increasing the footprint so they can design, you know, especially like a subdivision is big 20 acre thing. They have plenty of room to move around. They don't have to clear cut the place. You know, they can, if they have the architect sort of figure out where the best locations are for groups of trees, where they're going to provide good habitat, that would be my recommendation. And then yeah, Third, when you're talking about tree species, I sat in on Tumwater's meeting yesterday, and their urban forester had four different trees that they were gonna put out there, and one of them was a ginkgo. And I just wanna point that out as sort of a contrary, contrary choice. When you're looking at tree species, please look at their habitat value. You know, they either they provide habitat for caterpillars, they provide flowers and nectar, they provide acorns for acorn woodpeckers, they provide cavities for cavity nesters, something like that. The ginkgos don't do anything. So just keep that in mind. That's it. Thank you.

Thank you very much. All right, we're going to move online. If we have anybody online that would like to address the Planning Commission, raise your hand. Loretta Sepinen.

Hello, I'm Loretta Sepinen, and I live in Olympia, Washington. And I'm going to pick up the conversation some more about trees. It was helpful to hear Lynn speak last time. meeting about the ordinance that work that was done, which I believe is in the environmental section of the code 1727. That has some good language in it, but one of my asks for you tonight is to ask staff to consider what more is needed to protect our trees in critical areas. And Lynn mentioned that one of the things more that's needed is our largest trees to protect those. And that's what some of the other jurisdictions have been able to have language about. And then picking up on another theme from your last meeting related to trees is, I know that 1727 applies to a critical area because it says that right in that language and hopefully when somebody's at the counter and working on their project they're referred to 1727 as well as to the couple of items that are in the current cao not much but some in there about uh tree preservation well um I'm hoping that as this gets rewritten, that there'll be a better connection between those two things. So it's very clear and I don't have to just hope that it's working that way, but it's very clear that that's the way it works, that you do have to follow 1727 when you're doing development work anywhere. And then I really want you to pick up on your idea, again, have more conversation about it tonight, about the critical area ordinances or 1727 or both related to trees needing to apply to the UGAs. because as Lynn has mentioned to you tonight, that it's not gonna happen that way in the very near future if the county doesn't do something about that. So thank you for this opportunity, and I'm hoping that you don't leave this topic tonight, even though this is your last session on all of this, until you do a little bit more work with the staff on what needs to be done to protect trees in the critical area ordinance. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Is there anybody else online that would like to address the Planning Commission? All right, we'll move to staff debrief on public comment.

I might suggest that we move the debrief after the our guests.

That'd be just fine. We'll come back to that then after our DFW presentation. Yeah, just to make sure that we can get folks back to their regular business. You want to introduce DFW then?

Yeah, first I want to make sure, Kara, are you able to hear us and unmute yourself?

Yes, I can. Can you hear me okay?

We can hear you great. Thank you so much for being here tonight. Today we're going to hear a presentation from Kara Whitaker from Department of Fish and Wildlife pertaining to Fish and Wildlife Habitat Conservation Areas.

And I'm not seeing the button for sharing my screen. I saw the window pop up to become a panelist, but I'm not sure if that worked or not.

I would be a panelist to try it one more time, Corey. Yes, I'm going to try it one more time. OK. You'll need to accept that.

OK. Ah, I did not see the Join button down below.

Perfect.

Now you're muted. You have to unmute.

Yes, is that better? Thank you very much. I will now invite us to share the correct screen here. That will be this one. Just one moment, please. And from the beginning. All right, does that look as it should for my opening slide?

That's great.

Wonderful. Love when it works. Well, good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for inviting me to be your guest speaker tonight. And as mentioned, I'm coming to you from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. And my position there is Ecosystem Services Division Manager in the Habitat Program at Headquarters. So I was just there in Thurston County earlier today, it turns out. But then I came home to King County for the evening. So let's proceed. Did you know that WDFW works directly with all of Washington's cities and counties to plan for fish and wildlife habitat conservation? That's a total of 281 cities and towns and 39 counties statewide. I'm Kara Whitaker, WDFW's Ecosystem Services Division Manager, and I have the honor of leading our agency's engagement with local governments on land use planning. Let's kick things off with a brief overview of the main topics I'll be covering. First, I'll briefly refresh you on the key Growth Management Act or GMA requirements for critical areas. Then I'll describe WDFW's role in growth management in each of our land use planning priorities. Next, we'll explore the best available science and guidance for riparian ecosystems, followed by the limitations of the DNR riparian buffer approach. I'll also orient you to riparian management zone delineation. And finally, we should have time for any questions and comments at the end. With respect to critical areas, the GMA has some key requirements of local policies and development regulations. First, they must designate and protect critical areas, allow for no net loss of ecosystem functions and values, give special consideration to anadromous fisheries, and support viable connected populations over the long term. In fulfilling all of these requirements counties and cities shall include the best available science or BAS and they must conduct a best available science review when updating their critical areas regulations. I included links to the relevant Washington administrative codes or WACs on this slide here for your convenience. As you know, fish and wildlife habitat conservation areas, in essence, are lands and waters that support viable populations of species and habitats that are designated and protected as critical areas. A few common examples include habitat for state or federally listed species, waters of the state, and WDFW priority habitats and species, such as prairies and Oregon white oak woodlands. These areas are important because they ensure fish and wildlife continue to exist now and into the future, contribute to the state's biodiversity, provide recreational opportunities, and allow animals to move and migrate across the landscape. You may be wondering what is WDFW's role in land use planning. Within Washington's land use planning framework, WDFW's role is that of technical advisor to local jurisdictions. We work with cities and counties to designate and protect fish and wildlife habitat conservation areas based on the best available science. For technical assistance, our regional land use leads are the primary points of contact for long range planning and our area habitat biologists are the primary points of contact for current planning or local project review. We have two different online maps linked on this slide to help people find the appropriate contact for their needs. Okay, next let's dive into WDFW's land use planning priorities. These all serve to support fish and wildlife habitat conservation. Riparian ecosystems are one of our highest priority habitats statewide because they provide essential benefits to such a wide range of fish and wildlife species and people. It is important to adequately protect and restore riparian ecosystems to serve a wide range of functions and values. More to come on riparian functions here shortly. Another high priority for WDFW and others is salmon recovery. Your CAO can support salmon recovery by integrating information from local watershed plans, salmon recovery plans, and tribal management plans that identify salmon habitats and species of local and tribal importance, as well as riparian restoration opportunities. Collaborative cross-jurisdictional efforts are key to implementing successful recovery and restoration plans, especially for an anadromous fisheries, which as I mentioned, are required to have special consideration under the GMA. Habitat connectivity is another land use planning priority for WDFW. Per their definition in the WAC, we recommend that Fish and Wildlife habitat conservation areas include seasonal ranges, breeding habitat, winter range, and movement corridors. A range of additional regulatory and voluntary mechanisms, including zoning and open space corridors, also play important roles for habitat connectivity. In addition, our new Washington Habitat Connectivity Action Plan, also known as WACAP, includes maps, data, priority locations, and actions the local jurisdictions can use as they update their comprehensive plans and development regulations. Climate resilience is another WDFW priority for land use planning. For instance, we recommend climate-related adaptations, such as mitigating for wildfire hazard, planning for sea level rise, restoring floodplains, and maintaining habitat connectivity for species migration. The GMA now requires cities and counties to adopt policies and regulations to bolster their climate resilience. The Department of Commerce provides an array of GMA climate planning resources and guidance for this purpose, which we helped to develop. No net loss of critical area functions and values is another high priority to WDFW. No net loss is achieved by applying the mitigation sequence, and as I mentioned, is a fundamental requirement of the GMA. To apply the mitigation sequence means that mitigation measures are applied to a proposed development in a specific sequence of steps in order of priority. This includes avoidance of impacts first, then to minimize, rectify or reduce, and finally fully compensate for impacts, plus to monitor the compensation for its effectiveness over time. In addition, we highly recommend having a monitoring and adaptive management program at the jurisdiction scale to understand whether or not no net loss is being achieved. Last but not least is our final land use planning priority for local jurisdictions to use and adopt by reference our Priority Habitats and Species, or PHS, program. The program includes the PHS list, maps as shown here, and management recommendations, all of which have been updated since the last periodic update cycle. PHS is considered a source of best available science for critical areas ordinance updates and their implementation, especially for designating and protecting fish and wildlife habitat conservation areas. Now let's circle back and do a deeper dive into riparian ecosystems. Of particular relevance to current CAO updates is our Best Available Science for Riparian Ecosystems, also known as Volume 1, and our Riparian Management Recommendations, also known as Volume 2. Volume 1 describes the types and importance of riparian functions. Volume 2 describes how to delineate and manage riparian management zones, or RMZs, with the goal of providing fully functioning riparian ecosystems. The primary riparian functions include pollution removal, bank stability, shade, nutrient input, wood input, and habitat and connectivity for terrestrial wildlife species. These functions occur within all stream types, whether or not they have fish. In forested parts of the state or the forest ecoregion, the site potential tree height at age 200 is the riparian management zone width from which full riparian functions can be provided. Site potential tree height at 200 years is the distance from which a 200-year-old tree can fall into a stream and is based on the site soil type and the tallest dominant tree species. If a CAO designates and protects RMZs less than this width, There may be a net loss of riparian function and diminished potential to restore riparian function, depending on the existing conditions in the RMZ. Next, let's explore the process of riparian management zone delineation using this aerial view of one side of a stream. Starting from the inner edge of the stream's active channel or ordinary high water mark in blue, you map two lines. First, the width of site potential tree height at 200 years or this dashed green line. Then the minimum 100 foot pollution removal distance or this dashed yellow line. Then you simply use the wider of these two lines as the outer edge of your riparian management zone, this solid black line here. We created a Site Potential Tree Height online mapping tool where you can look up the Site Potential Tree Height 200-year value at a given site. For example, when you click on this polygon outlined in turquoise in the city of Shelton, The tool provides the site potential tree height value of 198 feet based on the Douglas fir that grow along these stream reaches. We also provide GIS data of site potential tree height polygons for mapping and analysis across your whole jurisdiction. We also developed guidelines for determining site potential tree height from field measurements. These are useful If you need to fill a gap in the online mapping tool or choose to validate the value provided by the online mapping tool. This involves two main steps. First, our guidelines describe how to collect the field data needed to calculate a site's potential tree height. This involves a forestry professional measuring the heights and ages of the biggest healthiest site trees near your stream. If it's not clear which tree species is dominant, your forester may need to measure the site trees of more than one species. The second step is to enter your current tree data into our Site Potential Tree Height Calculator. Your site tree's heights on the x-axis, I'm sorry, the y-axis, And their ages along the x-axis are then plotted as the red dots on these growth curves. Then the calculator provides the site potential tree height value at age 200 years on the far right side of the graph with the 95% confidence interval in the blue triangles. This information is also provided across the top of the graph For example, for the Western Hemlock at this location, the site potential tree height at age 200 is 193 feet, which can be used as the width of your RMZ. If your forester measured more than one tree species, then use the larger of the two site potential tree height at 200 values for your RMZ width. The traditional fixed width riparian buffer approach based on the Department of Natural Resources or DNR water types and maps has been widely adopted by cities and counties in Washington as shown in this table. Under this approach, the largest rivers or Type S shorelines receive the widest buffers under shoreline master programs. Other fish bearing or type F streams receive the next widest buffers and the non-fish bearing or type N stream types receive the narrowest buffers. While it makes some intuitive sense to provide more protection where fish are present, from a watershed perspective, it doesn't make sense to provide less protection to the upstream reaches because of their direct impacts on the conditions downstream and the other aquatic species that depend on those headwater habitats. In addition, DNR water typing and buffering approach was really only intended to be used in non-urban settings where forest practices occur and the riparian forests are regrown over time. In our review of the best available science, we found no scientific justification for protecting non-fish bearing streams less than fishbearing streams. Hence, our riparian recommendations apply to all stream types, which helps support riparian functions at the watershed scale. In addition, non-fishbearing streams support a unique community of wildlife, such as stream amphibians, provide wildlife movement corridors, and deliver nutrients, wood, and cool water to fish-bearing streams. For these reasons and more, we recommend riparian management zones be designated as fish and wildlife habitat conservation areas, not just as buffers that are separate from critical areas as they traditionally have been. Excuse me. Now let's circle back to the importance of the width of the riparian management zone. For example, near streams where the site potential tree height of 200 years is 140 feet, as shown in these bottom two images, a riparian management zone 140 feet wide will provide much better bank stability than an RMZ that's only 25 feet wide, as shown in the top two images. This example also illustrates the hazards and other impacts that can result from permitting buffer reductions, which are generally inconsistent with the best available science. In some scenarios where existing conditions preclude protecting and restoring fully functioning RMZs, we recommend a minimum RMZ width of 100 feet to at least support the pollution removal function. For instance, a 100 foot minimum RMZ can be an acceptable next best choice on non-fish bearing streams or streams where no function remains outside of 100 feet. In conclusion, according to the best available science, Within a full RMZ width, shown here in the yellow lines and either side of the stream in blue, critical areas ordinances should be written to one, protect existing riparian functions, which are the riparian vegetation within the RMZ. Two, enable restoration or enhancement of riparian functions that have been lost. And three, direct future development outside of RMZs. Accomplishing all of these things within a jurisdiction will require good alignment between regulations and voluntary incentives over time. We understand that the needs to protect critical areas and to build more housing are often viewed as conflicting trade-offs. We also know that careful, intentional land use planning can fulfill both of these important needs. And we work to help local jurisdictions find win-win solutions from the regulatory level to the project level for the benefit of fish, wildlife, and communities. With that, I thank you, and we should have some time available for your questions and comments.

Thank you very much. I guess we'll start out here. Does anybody have anything for Dr. Whitaker?

Please. Yeah, I was curious, I was looking through the map, I noticed a lot of Doug fir, a minority of red alder for our area when it was coming to the dominant tree species. How does a successional stage tie into that? Doug firs are trees that require a lot of sunlight. They're not necessarily trees that are going to be replacing themselves in a lot of these You know, all of evergreen was considered a Doug for dominant, but that's not going to be the tree that's growing in that area over time over this 200 year span we're talking about. So I guess I was curious as to what, how, how that, that, that, that is considered.

That is a great question. I would say that the, what shows up on the tool, what, the species and the heights are derived from both the soil data from national, the NRCS, natural resource conservation, and the, let's see. So what is on site might not match what's in the tool. And I would think the tool is, may represent that successional state, but I would have to go back and refer, confer with my science division colleagues to get a really clear answer on that, but I'd be happy to do so.

Commissioner Pestinger?

Thank you, Chair. I have several questions. Thank you so much for this presentation. Talking about non-fish bearing streams, I'm curious about that definition. When you all say you're talking about non-fish bearing streams, are you saying it's not currently fish bearing or you know something about the history and historically there's no record of it being fish bearing or that it might have the potential to be fish bearing? I know we have a long history in Washington of fish passage barriers and when they get removed, we're often surprised where fish are able to make it to. Does that come into play at all in the definition of non-fish bearing streams?

Yes. Yeah, those are important factors. And the If your county does stay with the water typing, there are methods in the field that are used for determining the fish, non-fish break. And those were recently updated by DNR and the Forest Practices Board, turns out. And so they're a combination of physical criteria and others. There's a whole board manual describing how to do it. And so in essence, If it could contain fish and you would expect fish there based on those criteria, we would count it as fish bearing. As you referred to, barrier removal can often create excess. And so other things like off-channel habitat may change over time and the fish might not be there in a particular time, but maybe another part of their life cycle. So we interpreted those along those lines.

Thank you. My second question, I've got four total. My second question is in Thurston County specifically, where would you see the greatest opportunity or are there any success stories we're having with habitat conservation or are there any opportunities for habitat conservation that you see for Thurston County?

I love these questions. These are good. I haven't looked at the draft CIO lately myself, though I saw a lot of things going in the right direction for sure. It's our regional region six staff. who are your direct points of contact, and I believe whom already probably have met with and received comment letters, and those will provide all those specifics, including, hey, we really like what you're doing here. This is really consistent with science, and here's more room for improvement over there. So I will defer to those detailed letters to answer that question. Though I can think of one good example of that is in addition to the update of the CAO and that engagement, it's the Northern Linkage Zone, which is a crossing. You've heard of it. It goes across I-5, and it's one of the last two potential crossings to connect the Cascades and the Olympics. And so we are collaborating closely with the county and other groups and WSDOT to try to maintain and improve, well, recreate that important high priority crossing. So that definitely stands out in Thurston County to me.

That's great to hear about. Thank you. My third question is about beavers. And beavers have an interesting history in the United States. And You know, I've heard that the populations nationwide were between 60 to 400 million and they were wiped out to near extinction, maybe down to 100,000 that they've recovered here in Washington. Maybe we have 60, 70 million or so. I see a lot of stuff on the Fish and Wildlife website about beavers. I see a lot of stuff on Pierce County, King County, Snohomish County, Whatcom County about beavers. I don't see very much about Thurston County. Do you know anything about beavers and traditional habitats and what benefits they may have provided to the habitat in Thurston County?

I don't know any specifics to Thurston County with respect to beavers. However, I do know that they are literally ecosystem engineers, and they do play an important role. As you can imagine, the way they slow down water and create more habitat for lots of other species. not just themselves, especially salmonids. I think it's cool to think about, you know, really small young salmon using beaver dams as a safe place to evade predators. So, but yeah, I think I will need to defer you to our wildlife program. And we do have a recent publication on beaver management that I pass along.

Thank you, I heard they also often help refill or recharge groundwater.

I wouldn't be surprised.

My fourth question has to do with a different topic, not so much one we want to save, but a noxious weed of poisonous hemlock. It's widely spread across the western US and all over the US. It's considered a noxious weed here in Washington. Do you know anything about how that's going here, especially in Thurston County? And do you know anything about, is it just a matter of containing it or is there an effort to remove it entirely?

Unfortunately, I couldn't tell you anything about that particular noxious weed, except that maybe, I know DNR is the lead agency on Well, it's not quite the same. We defer to them more on vegetation questions like that. Also, I'm thinking of ecology, maybe has some guidelines for their removal. But unfortunately, I can't offer you anything there in my experience.

Okay, well, thank you. That's it for me.

Commissioner Kaiser?

Thank you. Thank you, Cara, for a great presentation. You know, we had a presentation last week from one of our county colleagues who was talking a lot about oak prairies in Thurston County. And we saw maps that showed that huge amounts of Thurston County traditionally were managed landscapes, oak prairies, probably for many thousands of years. And that is a very specific habitat. And the county has some really great goals about bringing back some of those areas and retrieving the places that still exist. There are very few of them. In much of that area, though, over the last, say, 250 years since European colonization, we've seen fur forests come over and take over that habitat and take over that landscape. And some of those trees now are very old and very precious. And so it seems that we actually have some tough choices about habitat and which habitat we're going to prioritize in certain places. Because if we retrieve those oak prairies, it will involve taking down some of those big fir trees. And I was curious about how WDFW makes those kinds of choices?

Excellent question. Yes, that it is a conundrum identified and, you know, I think, I don't think we have this written in any guidance yet. But this, this conundrum has come up in some of our conversations. And you know, I think given that Oregon white Oak woodlands and individual trees are a priority habitat and so rare associated with many different rare species, uh, and often with, uh, prairies, as you mentioned, um, you know, there are habitat conservation plans in place, uh, for those quite a few of them in Thurston County, but, um, that's a little besides the point, but I think, um, it would make sense ecologically and be justifiable if we identified the areas that were historically oak woodlands. I think it would be justifiable to remove the dog furs that have encroached upon it for the restoration efforts of the oak woodlands themselves. We own some lands in the county, and we are removing dog furs from them exactly for that reason, to help the oak saplings have a chance to regenerate, because they take a long time to do that.

Is that like Scatter Creek, those areas there?

Yeah, exactly.

Thank you.

You bet.

Great. Thank you. Thank you for that. And thank you, Sandy, for asking one of the questions I was going to ask. I guess I was curious about that 200-foot diagram that we saw with So if that is the extent of the buffer on that side, that would suggest that we're looking for the big tree that would be right on the edge of that habitat. But we know that those large trees don't survive right on the edges. very well because of the way that weather or disturbances tend to wipe them out. So I guess, did you have recommendations of what that buffer should look like if we want to maintain that tree that's going to be able to reliably fall across the stream?

That's a good point. You seem to have a good forestry background based on your questions. And yeah, you know, I don't think that's part of our recommendations to put an additional buffer on that to help compensate or reduce the edge effects like you're referring to the microclimate that impacts those trees at the edge. But that's certainly something that you could incorporate within your county and your code if you wanted to increase that particular width by, I don't know, 10%. I'm just making that up at the moment. But that's another one I should bring back to the science division. And we could come up with a more concrete recommendation for you.

Does anybody else have any other questions? Thank you very much for coming in tonight and presenting for us. It was fantastic to see you here.

My pleasure. I'm glad you got a lot out of the slideshow and conversation. And I believe these slides are already posted online on your webpage. So I included all my notes. So hopefully that's useful in the future. And you can also feel free to reach out to me or to your Region 6 local contacts that I provided those links to as well with any additional questions.

All right. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Cara. Thank you.

You're welcome. Have a great evening.

Do you guys have any closing comments on this presentation?

I don't really think so. I think the one thing to note is we do have one of the grants that we got from the Department of Commerce is intended to be able to really develop some of the management recommendations and pull together all of the best available students about would be an effective riparian management zone in a prairie landscape. So using, you know, site potential tree height as Doug fir probably gives you enough space probably, but we're not sure. So we really want to dig into like how much, How much zone do you really need to manage in those prairie areas to get a functioning ecosystem? Because it's a it's a pretty different landscape than a Doug fir dominant or, you know, successional, like Pacific Northwest forest. And I did a little bit of light research. And my guess is the site potential tree height being set at Doug fir is likely because Doug firs are the tallest, even though they're not the final successional stage. I thought that I had about that as well.

Yeah. Commissioner Pessinger, did you have something?

Yes. Thank you, chair. This is a question for staff. Um, I, I know I've talked to several staff members over the years that have told me of examples where, and this question has to do with enforcement. Um, when, when we have, you know, rules that need to be followed and we have some property owners who are not very good at following the rules and sort of the limited abilities we have to enforce some of these rules. We've had a lot of conversations in the planning commission about how can we put more teeth into things? How can we make things stronger? But I know there's still just some certain limitations in the law. And one of my questions was, it has to be the most frustrating experience when we have property owners who are kind of perpetual rule breakers and break the same rules over and over. And yet they continue to apply for new permits, new permits, and Is there any way for that history of them having broken the rules previously many times to be taken into consideration in their future permits? And, uh, I'm sure the staff would like to do that. Um, I'm wondering from the staff, is there anything we as planning commissioners could do to make a recommendation for anything that would help them in that area?

I will say that I'm not an expert in our codes around compliance, and that's kind of a separate – I'm going to pull the classic bureaucrat move. This is not me. So I want to be very careful about speaking out of turn and not fully understanding. But I can think of a couple examples where we've got some tools. First off, I think the general approach is – If you have a good relationship and people are actually showing up at the permit counter, that's the best place to get compliance. Getting compliance after the fact, after somebody's done something. or there's been some sort of action or minor disaster, catastrophe, whatever you want to call it, it's much harder to get compliance there and it takes an incredible amount of resources at the county level to do that retroactively. So first goal is usually build a system where people come in the front door and you can actually make sure that you have a decent relationship and you can really make sure that those standards that we're setting are getting implemented. That's usually best practice.

Fortunately, with our permit system here in the county and the upcharge that we're causing for permits, people are more apt to go ahead and create the violation than to apply for a permit.

That's always a problem. So we're trying to do as much as we can to make, and I think we've had this conversation here a lot of times about trying to make the system something that's manageable, something that's predictable. We went out, we were talking to the master builders this week, and they were pretty, honestly, pretty excited about some of the changes that we're making, at least the way that we're talking about making sure that things are predictable, people know what's going to happen. It's okay if the answer is no, they just want to know. Those kinds of conversations are, so I think we're moving the, we're making sure that that front door is easy to find, easy to get through. So that's only one part of it. And the county really does struggle with resources for enforcement goals.

And part of that is because it's all based on permit fees pays for the department instead of any money out of general fund. And other counties, they do it differently. Yeah, the general fund picture of the county is not super pretty. It's not good. The problem is, is that a lot of other counties out of the 39 counties, there's about four counties that their sole source of revenue for that department is permit fees. All the other counties, a large part of it comes out of their general fund, and their permit fees are lower.

And permit fees, those are essentially cost recovery for the permitting. That's what they are.

It's a cost recovery versus most people that I talk to, they're very upset and disappointed with the county process for permit applications and charges because of that. And some people live in other counties, so they've had the experience with permits in other counties versus this county. and they're very frustrated with it, and they want to know why when we're paying all this money for property taxes, et cetera, can't more of the general fund dollars be used to pay for those things, which is what they were originally designed to do. But this county has really taken it on to against recovery for everything in every department.

I don't know if that's quite true because I probably don't understand all the aspects of it here, but it seems like every other area of enforcement in the county, from dog catcher to speeding tickets, there's all sorts of enforcement that the county does in all different areas of our lives, but land use issues, enforcement and land use issues seem to be the ones that get the fewest attention out of the general fund. Maybe that's not true. Maybe that's not a fair assessment because I don't remember where dog catcher money comes from. Something tells me that dog catcher money doesn't come from catching dogs. They don't usually have deep pockets.

To that end, I was going to say that it seems to me that the bang for your buck in terms of the rest of those developers a lot more than you're going to get from going after someone's dog. You're, you're, you're dealing with a lot more areas where that touches. So it does seem like it would be something that would be worth investing in. I did want to like, just for the interests of moving forward, this isn't something we have to like discuss now or anything like that. But when we're talking about when I was mentioning the, the edge effect and those aspects to buffers. I'm interested if there are mechanisms or restoration options that allow a increased edge shield effect that wouldn't require as much buffer in areas where we can't get that. That might be something that would be worth exploring. rather than just like always, I mean, I'm always in favor of having more protected area, obviously, but like in areas where we don't have that option, if we could have a different compensating mechanism.

There are also other ways to think about it too. So if you zoom way out and think about places, there are places where from ecosystem health perspective, we want trees. There's some places we don't want trees if we're thinking about prairies. you might not have something like a, you could have a situation where you might not have something like a, you know, there's an extra, you know, riparian buffer, but you might have identified areas where you have certain clearing and grading rules. So you, certain spaces where we are, we're, designing the system to maintain trees generally. You do have these special higher standards in the critical areas. So there are other ways to think about it. Like where does the critical areas ordinance kind of drop off and a clearing and grading ordinance pick up? So there are lots of different moving pieces and different regulatory overlays. I could talk about this for a long time. So there are ways to do it that could even be different than doing it through the critical areas. And one of the things that we're looking to do, so there was a note in the presentation from Dr. Whitaker about monitoring and adaptive management. And that is something that we're looking at. And if we think about trees being important from more than just a riparian buffer, there are kind of two major things that you want from at a landscape scale, which you're looking at for, you want trees for, you want them for that riparian habitat, at least when we're talking about sand recovery, water quality, those types of things, the riparian areas, and then overall watershed canopy cover. is the next most important factor. So we might, what we're probably going to be looking at is ways to kind of monitor and measure overall watershed canopy cover. And also that would give us kind of that linkage to say, if we're trying to maintain canopy cover, we're likely to be doing it for, even for as a stormwater requirement to try and manage the hydrology and landscape scale. not just from development. So there are a whole bunch of different ways that we can think about protecting trees and kind of how those different regulatory mechanisms kind of all link up and try to not overlap all of them, because that's where it gets really ugly. If you've, like right now where we've got critical areas and shoreline master program all on top of each other, you sometimes might even be able to throw some habitat conservation program on top of it, some endangered species, like the more you can kind of let one thing do its job and not try and make everything do the same job, like let the regulations play positions.

Is the no net loss monitoring on a programmatic level going to be similar to what we've done with SMP then?

Yeah. similar and what i what i think is really different is that it's really trying to integrate again kind of integrate all of the different regulatory authorities that we are we have and those the responsibilities that come along with those and be able to figure out kind of whether or not we're gaining using ground in either of those spaces we have a work session um for a uh and work session with the board on it next week. Okay, so we'll be talking about our net gain framework that we're building out. Commissioner Pestinger.

Just curious, is this the discussion of public comment or is that still coming?

That's still coming.

Cool, thanks.

Does anybody else have any other questions of staff about our guest presentation that we just had?

Everything that I can think of has already been asked.

Okay.

You're definitely interested in follow up on this. Okay.

Well, we'll coming back with this type of critical area. We haven't really landed on anything. There'll be code drafts still to come. Like there's, there's still a lot of time for guidance on this.

Great. Thank you.

And we will circle back on our agenda to item number four, the public communication debrief.

Okay.

Um, Tacking back, one thing I think I do want to note is when the department went to the board with the different kind of staff time estimates for the docket, the assumption was kind of that quick and easy adopt by reference. So if we're thinking about just resources, all of those resource assumptions were made at that time. it'll be kind of a quick administrative exercise versus something that's a much deeper dive. So when we're thinking about staff resources we have to spend on things like joint codes, those are still set at those pretty low FTEs. Off the top of my head, I think it's like 0.2 FTE for some of those projects. It was intended as a really kind of light touch administrative. So that's just something to consider when we're thinking about how to move forward on joint codes. So the available time that we have to spend on joint codes is pretty narrow.

Well, I'm sympathetic to it. The whole idea of blindly adopting other jurisdictions code is something that I'm not sure that I'm going to firm up on. I still feel super squishy about it.

We understand that.

Especially since some of these jurisdictions...

I agree with Chair Cassino and also that this is not the first time. We didn't just start mentioning this. That topic has been mentioned by planning commissioners for years, and the topic of tree preservation has been mentioned by planning commissioners for years. So I don't know why the assumption was made that we would just automatically adopt it and not need to spend any money or effort on it.

Good question.

Make sure Kai's very clear. That sounded like Loretta. Oh, okay.

It was not me.

Public communication debriefs.

Colin was...

I'm sorry. I was just saying that I'm especially concerned since some of these jurisdictions don't seem to be able to prioritize tanagers instead of triceratopses when it comes to the kinds of trees that they're wanting to plant. That's a good one. Like the ginkgos? Yeah, those ginkgos. That actually genuinely surprised me. I generally think of the cities as being a little bit more on it than that.

Do you think triceratops are really an option? Oh, that's cool.

Maybe.

Okay, go ahead. So I know one of the comments we received asked us to make a detailed walkthrough and they gave some examples. And I personally don't think that's a good use of staff time. And I wanted to give a little comparison between some of those things because I think that's helpful. Example, Portland. Portland is twice the population of our entire county, including cities. It has 10 times fewer trees than us. It's almost entirely urban. And its heritage tree ordinance doesn't apply to rural areas or UGA. It's a multinational county. It only applies to the city. So I don't think it's realistic for the county to adopt something that a city with significantly more resources and like orders of magnitude, fewer trees, is managing when it's largely already had developed. King County was another example. King County has seven and a half times the population of Thurston County. Only 10% of its population lives in the world. It lives in unincorporated King County. And half of that is in UGAs that is dramatically better resourced. Almost all of their tree cover is outside of their cities in mountains that no one can build in. Austin, Texas was given this example. Again, you're running into the issue where it's a city. It has three and a half times the population of Thurston County. It has 18 times larger landmass than any of our cities, it is massive like Austin, Texas covers three counties and is more than 30 miles wide at certain points which is just wild to me like it looks, it would be a county in Washington. But, yes. It's a very different thing. And there's also a lot of inequity there where they do have a goal to hit 50% tree canopy cover, but almost all of that work is happening on the far less populated incorporated areas on the other side of the city. So it's very disparate. East Austin doesn't get really any tree remediation. Almost all of that work happens in West Austin. And then finally, just a comparison with the local cities, like The unincorporated Thurston County is 600 square miles. The cities are roughly 18. And so I think scope wise, comparing what a city is doing for what the entire county should do when, you know, we have less population than them and dramatically more land. A better comparison, or at least where I would encourage staff to try and look for alternatives or what other folks are doing are similarly sized counties doing stuff in rural areas. I don't think comparing us to cities is a fair comparison. They have much smaller areas that they're managing, much higher numbers of resources and a far fewer trees. So that's just my thoughts on it and I think it's useful to put out there. Tree conservation is absolutely a worthwhile endeavor, but I think it's unrealistic to ask the county to prop up heritage tree ordinances that cities with significantly more resources on much smaller lands with much fewer trees are trying to do. Just realistically, even if we passed it, there would be no FTEs to staff it. There would be no way of enforcing it that I can think of. And so we need to look at solutions that will actually work for what we are, which is accounting.

And I think the comment was more toward the UGAs, which is what the cities could incorporate. And we could adopt their tree ordinances by reference. So that's a much smaller area, particularly when you take a look at the UGAs and a lot of the cities have been incorporating a large portion of the UGAs just in the last couple of years. So I think that was where the comment was not not necessarily incorporating UGA and city county code for trees into the rural area. Although that wouldn't be a bad deal, but I'm just saying.

I think one of the big challenges that we have is the way that we do joint planning can be really difficult.

Because if we were to stand up a program that could do what What we're essentially being asked to do right now is the county is doing urban level planning. and rural planning. These are very different landscapes. They're very different needs. Urban planning is an entirely different discipline than rural planning. In the planning world, we see ourselves as very, very, very different. So that's one thing to think about. And when we're talking about UGAs, UGAs are urban growth areas. Those aren't like transition zones where you're transitioning from urban to to rural, those are intended for urban level development. And the cities are much better, just kind of like baseline resource and posture, are much better resourced and much better postured to do urban level development. And for us to be trying to do both is a really, really big lift, a very big ask. So that's a difficulty that we have, just kind of a baseline structural challenge. Fun fact, Texas doesn't have UGAs.

They have what are called extra territorial jurisdictions. And basically all cities just get like a five mile outline buffer around them that kind of function the same way. And if they annex more, then the buffer just goes out another five miles, which is why if you look at it, it kind of looks like a squid at points. It's very weird.

One of the other challenges that we've brought up before, and I always remember Scott talking about this, is that if we end up with kind of this like weird in-between code and we start having our UGAs developed in this kind of like weird peri-urban way, we might get like much we might get housing that is like not as dense as we would want it to be and that pattern is going to persist until it's economically viable to tear those houses down and build new ones so we we we can set the trajectory for what this is going to look like for a generation or two before those houses are going to get redeveloped and we're on a you know generally a 50 to 100 year redevelopment time

I think that that speaks to what Ms. Norton was talking about regarding development and wanting to make sure that in the UGAs we are pushing towards narrower, denser development precisely so that we do end up setting them up for success when it comes to being able to implement meaningful true ordinances while also like providing the density that we're asking them for, so. Some of the cities, frankly, aren't there yet. Some of the cities I don't think are quite acting like the urban areas they are, but we can at least set them up for success once they do get there.

Since you evoked Ms. Norton, I think I want to speak to one of the things that she talked about, the procedural change that she spoke to about bringing the architect in early. I think this is a problem that's been, it's faced every kind of major development challenge that I've worked on. I did state policy work for the low-impact development for stormwater. I've done shoreline armoring work. And then this, like tree protection, there's this point at which There's a way that developers usually do business and they kind of default to that and they can kind of do it again and again and again. It's predictable for them. They know they're not going to get their stamp taken away. They... But there is this challenge where if you can bring people in and get them early in their kind of project concept, it might even be before they brought their architect on, and show them a different way to do that development, people will often like it. I worked on developing the Shore Friendly Program that came out of the Department of Fish and Wildlife, where you can bring out a coastal engineer like there was like direct outreach to people, shoreline property owners. You bring out a coastal engineer, they can tell you what kind of risk environment you're working in. You know, you probably don't actually need a bulkhead here. Maybe you need a little bit of supplementation, like show them a different way to interact with their shoreline. We also removed armoring. Well, how do you incentivize that? There is, it's a resource question. So you need to have, You need to have the resources for when people show up at that permit counter. So you might need people who are actually design professionals they can talk to. Or the Shore Friendly Program is a great example. I don't think the state resources are really there anymore, but it used to be that if you, like a county identified somebody, our Shore Friendly Program works through the conservation district. But they can identify a landowner who's interested in something else. You hook them up with a coastal engineer who can show them a different way to do it. It's not a bunch of basalt on their shoreline. But that takes those take resources. So I know. Like our team would need people who can do design, like proactive design work versus kind of reactive design review. And that's a problem. That's a really common problem that happens with low impact development. Stormwater, you can often have a different outcome for stormwater if you intercede in the early site planning and you can lay out a site differently, put, you know, put the development on places that are going to infiltrate poorly, put all of your infrastructure in places that infiltrate well. You can usually, I shouldn't say usually, but you can often get a different outcome that's better if you start with the thing you're trying to you're trying to achieve versus somebody who sits down with paper and, you know, tries to draw out as many.

So do you believe that this bottleneck then is not so much of when this could happen, when this should happen, but a resource issue?

So I think there are resource issues. I know we've talked about like, how can we, how can we like kind of as almost a stopgap for what Ms. Norton was talking about, could we work on guidance manuals for how to develop in certain environments and what we would like to see people start with and consider in their site planning prep? So.

I'm wondering, it seems like we end up with a lot of resources that we end up kind of needing to put in at that end after all of this has been, you know, those disaster cases you were talking about. And then it seems like the best place to be putting our resources in this preventative stage. And I'm wondering what it would look like to do a little bit more resource allocation from our end, probably shifting more from that middle up into a little bit more of a preventative stage.

It's hard because a lot of that isn't necessarily, like you have to make an upfront investment. Some of it could be cost recoverable, but it's hard to make that cost recoverable. You need to have the resources on hand. You could work with local designers. That was one thing that I know I've done in the past.

I guess that was where I was coming in. I know that a lot of the local designers the local NGOs focused around sustainable development do have their own planners and folks like that on board. And it might be a handy resource to be able to provide if we can, if we can compound that. I don't know if we have any folks who would be able to do that.

I imagine when you met with OMB this last week, this would be something that you would talk about, wouldn't it? Or in a future OMB meeting? Yeah. Yeah.

I will say too, one of the directions already, it's not as robust as what you're talking about, but that the folks who operate the front counter on the planning side have been doing is setting up the ability and kind of encouraging people more to come in for pre-meetings and they offer multiple different levels of And they're less formal than like a full pre-application or pre-submission meeting, which some permits do require. But if you just need dedicated time for someone to look at your property in advance, put some notes down for you, come talk you through it and explain it to you. And you have a guaranteed meeting time rather than coming in and trying to wait. I know that's a system that's being implemented already. And I think that'll help with that open door. Just getting people to that front door, getting people to understand up front what's going on.

I know that's a resource issue, but I mean, to incentivize it, if you had one of these ask a planner meetings that you generally charge the applicants for, if that money was then able to be applied to one of his other permitting fees at some point or another, because it would, you know, overall save time and money at some point or another. It'd be a really good return on investment. It'd be a really good return for everybody. It'd be better for everybody.

Yeah, but we have been thinking about ways we can build a regulatory system that if you take the high road, if you will, there's a little more deference. We understand it's a lot less scrutiny. It's smoother, faster. Yeah.

Definitely trying to build the framework for that. And the CAO in particular, setting up strict standards for what goes into a report and who is qualified to do that type of report so that we don't have to expend the time and energy and also sometimes the frustration on the applicant side, going back and forth on reporting in particular, I know is time consuming and sticky.

Yeah, I will say that having worked here for a while now, two things that this department are very much are innovative and really scrappy. We do a lot with not a lot. Yeah. I've been really impressed.

Do you want to address any of the other public comments?

I think some of the UGA and CAO kind of overlap things. I know the direction that folks got from the planning commission on the joint codes has prompted it back to the drawing board. Oh, boy. So, yeah. we can bring some of those suggestions back in. So I do agree that I think if we did do a comparative analysis, it probably would be on local codes to look and see if the planning commission had gaps. But it's not my team that's bringing those forward. And I think it is a pretty back to the drawing board.

Does anybody else have anything on public comment debrief? Okay. Commissioner Pestinger, please.

Just a quick clarification. Maybe that's what Mr. Day was just referring to, but the question about should the tree protection standards be in one chapter or a different chapter or both? Is that what you were just talking about, Mr. Day?

I was talking about, we got a lot of feedback on the pre-protection in the UGAs via the joint code updates. So I was speaking to the fact that those joint code updates, I think there's some back to the drawing board strategizing going on right now for how to move forward.

Okay. Do you have an answer about that question that was raised in public comment about which chapter it ought to be in?

No. Yeah. Oh, go ahead, Claire.

It's appropriate to have. And this is what we've talked about a little bit even last time with HCP and SMP and our other environmental codes. And you even touched on it a little earlier where you're saying we can have different pieces of regulation, essentially play different positions in the field as a sports metaphor.

No little kids soccer. People watch kids chase the ball around the field.

Yeah, they all go in one spot and it doesn't work very well. I think it's fairly appropriate to have those be separate codes that function well together. And that is kind of the goal with the CAO and all of the other things that we have that touch on different parts of the environment to have them play their own role well, and then also integrate well with other pieces that manage other things. We can ensure that where it's appropriate, like with the example of today in riparian zones, particularly those in areas that have historically been dug for forest, that those remain forested areas because of the functions those trees have. They're really part of that critical area. So the critical area absolutely does pertain to and protect trees. But plenty of trees are in areas outside of those kind of five delineated critical areas that the CAO needs to stick to. And that's what the Title 17 more general codes allow us to do.

That sounds great. Thank you.

All right. Staff updates. All right. We have a couple staff kind of staff updates. We have a new permit tech. Ms. Erica Smith Erickson has joined us. We have a new plans examiner, Matt Newton. And... Replacing in as much as anyone ever could, our outgoing Maya people is Ms. Anna Rodriguez, who you all know. So Anna is the new Maya as bureaucrats. Let's meet your short and associate planner. Currently. That is the dilemma of the in-house promotions, but it's always good for people to have a good promotional opportunity. Please congratulate Anna on that, please. Will do. A couple other things. I think I mentioned it earlier. Next week, I think it is. We have a work session with the board on... the net gain framework grant that we have that we're partnering with the Thurston Conservation District on. So that is the project that we're doing to look across all of our regulatory systems, all of the obligations that we have, all of the things that we're trying to track kind of loss or gain of. Our obligation is generally it's no net loss, but I think we have a community and a community a board that would really want us to be thinking about doing better than just not getting any worse. So that'll give us a framework for being able to understand how we're doing across the landscape for ecosystem function and where we're putting function back on the landscape and some of the dials that we have to kind of reduce the impact of the things that get us in the debit column. So development and regulations, those types of things.

Those are my primary updates. Did you say that was happening at the work session that's happening next week? It's at the board next week.

All right. Well, we're going to look at our calendars. Our next meeting is June 17th, and we do have a public hearing during that meeting as well. Is anybody not expecting to be able to make the June 17th meeting? And after that would be our July 1st meeting. Is anybody expecting that they won't be able to make July 1st? Does anybody have anything for the good of the order? Commissioner Pestinger.

Thank you, Chair. Today, I just happened to be driving and drove down East Side Street, which I think Rhonda Larson Kramer just said where she lives, and I drove up through Watershed Park. And it just struck me, Watershed Park is absolutely stunningly beautiful little local gem of preserved trees and landscape in our urban development of Olympia. And it's one of those things that people chose historically to preserve. And I know there were people at times that wanted to develop there. And, uh, when we hear people say how much they love living in Thurston County and they're attracted to Thurston County and, and value the quality of life here, they're often referring to having things like that right in our local community. And, People commented earlier about the value of nature and the value of preservation and protection. I'm glad people saved Watershed Park and LBA Woods and other places historically, even though people wanted to develop them at times. I hope we do things to protect similar things that people will look back at and say, I'm glad someone protected that. And then the second thing I want to say is just out of respect for our fellow commissioner, I should have mentioned this during the meeting minutes, but our fellow commissioner Lola Flores, her last name is spelled F L O R E S not with a Z. Oh, yeah.

Thanks. Thank you. It's spelled right here. So thank you.

Does anybody else need to go to the order?

Happy Pride Month. Saw the flag out front.

Oh, and if anyone wants to appreciate Watershed with me, I'm out there every Saturday morning at 8 doing a hike. He does rucking with the heavy weighted backpack and stuff. You don't have to do that part. How far is the... We do the loop twice. It's like 1.5 miles. Very early. I could never.

Yeah. I would love to. Waking up early to walk the rocks on my bed. I sleep.

Another weight in there in memory of you.

All right.

Well, having no further business, this meeting is adjourned. Thank you.

Thank you for shepherding that. A little bit of defense for you guys.

I want to clarify and clarify publicly as well. My ask was to look at those policies. You're doing it. A couple of things in those.

In the next few days or so, let me know.

I'm going to be doing some right now.

My main concern is that we're asking for things that are without resources. Like, Austin, Texas has 17 times the number of employees. This is my dinner.

I have to go right here to the roaster.

60 times the county's budget. So I just want our solutions to actually be something good.

Those are policies that may have just a nugget, just a thing that we could, regardless of the size of the community, they use diameters of trees, but we could use diameters of trees. So that was my point. And quite frankly, I felt a little of it. And I will re-clarify if that was not clear.

I got the impression that you wanted us to do a heritage tree program, which I don't know how we'd have the resources to do that.

I wasn't asking for that. So I was looking at, you know, could there be components of the other policies that other people have already created the wheel, we might take a spoke of the wheel. So that was that just want to make sure I appreciate you clarifying and I was not trying to upset anyone.

I was just trying to be defensive of staff times.

And I get that. I've been a manager my whole life. I get it.

I want solutions that will work. I don't want us to end up with something that looks good on paper, but we can't ever afford to have people actually do. I wouldn't be surprised if the cities don't see where they want. They're just going to ask. If they annex it, then whatever we said is meaningless.

And FYI, just so you guys know, you may already know, the largest housing development in Washington state is currently being built out by McCleary. And so I'm worried about that, what's going to happen there, and how many are granted. It's Grace Harbor. How many regs they will just blow out because it's Grace Harbor. But there's a huge wetland. Huge wetland. within that jurisdiction. And the comment about one of the slides was wetlands to be determined, but it's already out of the jurisdiction. Did you guys say you just fill that sucker in?

I bet they haven't done that for a living.

I don't know. I'm curious what Fish and Wildlife or if they have any involvement in this project. It's huge.

It is huge. You probably are aware of it. It is. Oh. So you'd reach out to them? Yeah, the regional work. Yeah, so regional stuff. So that I think is so...

I grew up in central Pennsylvania. The closest city to me, because I grew up in a very rural area, was Phillipsburg, which was built on a swamp. They just backfilled the whole thing. And let me tell you, you can buy whole houses for $25,000 there. Every basement is full of water. Everything needs French drains and sump pumps, and you can't develop density. Because they were all built in the 1800s, so there was no environmental planning. We made land with dirt, so we're good now.

if they were um if they were if it's timberland the timber companies yeah i'd love to yeah i just yeah i just forgot about it this afternoon before it came so there's an interesting thing that i mean it is grace harbor but yeah and they're very smaller and they're permissive than have a situation where you have incentives they're actually bigger than So they could invest money in their building to create energy efficiency, but they don't pay the energy bill, right? And down these transactions that can be created where a third party comes in and becomes an energy tenant to basically sign a lease that has all of its own protection signs. They invest in the energy improvements, but they get the savings. The tenant pays their power bills if nothing happened, and the utility agrees to use the savings.

infrastructure.

Less nice chairs and the public get the same chairs. They want us to improve. Basically, everything stays the same except for the county commissioners who get the fancy chairs. Who is the tenant of the board?

Like, I don't know if... If you get paid back. Yeah, I'm just thinking on some of your tenants, like Harbor Wholesale or Parkland, their energy costs are so high already that they do definitely need

They might.

They do.

They might.

But if it was like an office, they wouldn't care about it.

Yeah. Like with Cardinal and Harvard. Keeping things cool is creating excess heat or Cardinal is just creating heat through their processes. Is there a way to, rather than just vent that to the atmosphere, capture it and take it to another facility and do some industrial symbiosis stuff where the waste from one facility in heat or water or whatever can actually be of beneficial use to somebody next door? yeah um that stuff is really cool i went to denmark on a tour and saw industrial parks that are just designed around this concept of sharing resources um and it's budget it's pretty dang cool so it's been a long time since i went to the cardinals i was there there's two they were the second largest well let's just take the energy they don't have a city and it was like i think that we had a power out like power outage

I just want to be realistic here.

I want to see it function.

Yeah, no. It's just so wildly different. There's no way we're going to end up with 20 square miles of heat. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. When there's a power outage, you go turn the hospital on, and then you go to cardboard.

Right, right. And then you go to the jail. Yeah, yeah. And then you go to law, and then you go to L&E Bar.