EDITORIAL

According to several people who are on Land Use Advisory Committees in Pierce County, there are new development regulations that have passed through the Planning Commission and the Hearings Examiner are are slated to be in front of the Pierce County Council for approval and adoption, possibly as early as January 2018.

If you look on the County Council website, their main page doesn’t even mention they have a site to look at meeting minutes, videos or agendas. Here is a link to find what they are planning to take action on each week.

[The page calls it – What We Do. That is helpful, right?]

The item is called: Proposed Amendments to Title 18, Proposed Ordinance No. 2017-89.

This is a link to the medusa of development regulations.

This is not light reading, but PLEASE, if you care about being informed there is a new, and unusual development coming to your corner, you WILL care. Those yellow signs and postcards? They may be a thing of the past. You simply will no longer be notified what is coming your way next if this passes as it is.

Are you ready to call your councilperson yet? Or, will you wait until a big box store puts a warhouse nextdoor placing your home in a permanent shadow, or maybe at 5 story apartment across the street? We really do like knowing so we can get accomodations, right?

Seiously, please read this. I am certain the Master Builders love it, and love this Executive and Council for considering these. The community plans have become amorphous, community idenities have been gradually swept under the carpet of county paperwork. Communities as they were will cease to be since Pierce OCUnty is now the FASTEST growing county in the entire U.S.A. I heard one real estate person estimate the current inventory homes was only enough to last about 21 days. The expansion is real and in just a couple years, you are not going to recognize the place you grew up.

They are looking to build houses so close together (on septics) they will pollute the water table. That sole sorece aquifer everyone was afraid the dump near Kapowsin would pollute? (It has begun on neaby test wells.) But now they are remiss to spend the money to expand the sewers to these tightly packed mid-county developments, so septics will be “going” on your aquifer too, literally. Add this to Methane or LNG plants pouring de-oxygenated water into Commencement Bay where the oxygen levels are already too low for the sealife.  Great decision making is taking place right here in Peirce County. Ya gotta love these guys.

If only someone other the contractors funded county elections… Please read, comment, talk seriously about this with your council person. Even the Rural Separator in Summit, Waller, Midland and North Clover Creek Collins is affected. Pierce County is changing, rapidly. You need to get involved.