Planner responds to shoreline concerns

By Diana Zimmerman

Garrett Phillips, a planner for the Columbia River Estuary Study Taskforce, has been working with a committee of local residents on a Shoreline Management Plan (SMP) for Wahkiakum County. Each county in the state of Washington has been required to update the plan, first written in the 1970s.

“It’s about protecting public resources and preventing development from damaging them,” Phillips said. “Fish rely on the habitat, other animals too. People like to use the water. There is not a lot of development happening in Wahkiakum County compared to other parts of the state, so people feel like this is overkill. This process was designed for places like Olympia where they have a lot of development and they have big impacts on that development that need to be dealt with. But the law says it needs to be done in Wahkiakum County too.”

According to Phillips, 90 percent of the land in the county is not regulated by the SMP.

He acknowledged that most people live in the other 10 percent, the county’s river valleys, where most of the development happens, and noted that he tried to be sensitive to that.

The SMP is not just about the state’s expectations for how residents of the county are expected to be stewards of local waterways, but it is an opportunity for residents of Wahkiakum County to have a very personal say in how it will be done.

In the existing SMP, for instance, if a home that was already been built inside the buffer of a waterway burned down, it could be rebuilt in the same place if it is done within a certain length of time.

The local committee has written in a longer grace period into the Wahkiakum County SMP plan, according to Phillips, with hopes that the state will show some leniency and pass it.

Phillips is patient and generous in meetings. He has listened carefully and acknowledged the concerns of committee members or emotional landowners who tell him what is wrong with the plan or what needs to be changed. He makes notes and looks for ways to adjust the writing in the plan when he can.

What he wants most is to hear from people who have specific concerns about what the SMP means to them, not only to clarify or ameliorate their fears, but to make sure they are being heard when the document has been completed and sent to the Department of Ecology for review.

For instance, if a landowner wants to build an addition to his home that is currently within the designated buffer but he’s not sure what the SMP means to him? Phillips wants to talk to him.

“I think there are some predominant misconceptions,” Garrett Phillips said on Tuesday in a phone interview. “One of the things I’ve heard is that the SMP is going to shut down farming, fishing and forestry businesses.”

“When it comes to farming or agriculture, whether is is crops or livestock, the SMP does not regulate existing agricultural activities,” Phillips said. “That is really important. The SMP will only regulate somebody who is doing some kind of completely new agriculture in a place where agriculture hasn’t been done before. Like if they cleared a forest and started doing agriculture. But if a farmer switches between livestock and crops on an existing farm, these regulations would not kick in. You could let your fields lie dormant and then start back up again and these regulations will not kick in. There are only a special set of circumstances.”

Livestock that have had access to local waterways will still have access to waterways.

If someone decides to farm an area along a waterway that has never been farmed in any way? There must be a buffer. Animals will not have access. Crops must remain outside the buffer.

The SMP does not regulate fishing or forestry at all.

“It regulates whether you can build a fish loading and processing facility on the shoreline,” Phillips said. “That is the kind of thing that is permitted. That is the kind of thing that the SMP encourages. You are supposed to be able to do businesses that depend on a shoreline.”

“As far as forestry,” he continued, “timber harvests are regulated by the Forest Practices Act, as they have been for a long time. Road building is regulated by the SMP, but there has been no change to that policy, so it is exactly as it was before.”

To hear more, the next meeting for the Shoreline Management Plan is scheduled for May 26, at 6 p.m. at the Rosburg School at Johnson Park.