Should Latah Valley take more growth without transit or habitat protections?
Brian Muegge says the preferred growth map directs more development toward Latah Valley without adequate transit access, habitat protection, or wildfire planning.
“The preferred alternative still signals where the city intends to fund and grow. And that signal has real long-term consequences.”
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... for my life, so I'm used to it. Thank you, and thank you to the planning commission and planning staff. My name's Brian Muegge. Echoing just all the Herculean effort that folks have done to get this together for our community. Thank you. I'm a local resident naturalist. I also served as a member of the Spokane County Comprehensive Plans Natural and Rural Lands Technical Advisory Committee, so I just wanted to share my input on that. I'm commenting to strongly urge that the city adopt a preferred alternative that prioritizes conservation connectivity and low impact land use in Hangman Creek, Thorpe, and the greater Latah Valley Corridor, which, from a name perspective, is likely closest to alternative three. Given that the landscape represents one of the more intact and connected habitat corridors remaining in the Spokane region, just wanted to flag that on our committee, on our comprehensive plan committee, we've been looking at the WHCA, WA-CAPS, the Washington Habitat Connectivity Analysis Project, and that has identified this area as priority for maintaining regional and ecological connectivity between the Channel Scablands and Hangman Creek in the upland areas. Also, this growth strategy is built around directing density towards the centers and corridors, which I definitely support. However, the Hangman and Thorpe-Latah corridor really doesn't function as a transit corridor. It's constrained by steep topography, limited access to 195, and a lack of transit services, and increasing density here, as it's shown in alternative two, I think would be questionable and irresponsible. I also wanted to just briefly address the comment earlier about how there's already existing plats and therefore the zoning won't change. And while that may be in the short term, the preferred alternative still signals where the city intends to fund and grow. And that signal has real long-term consequences. So even though those platted developmentsThey don't guarantee full build-outs with maximum intensity, and they shouldn't, especially in areas like the Hangman Creek area corridor that has environmental constraints. And so it's really critical that the city not further incentivize or reinforce these higher intensity developments in this plan. Additionally, in this corridor, there's already examples of sites identified for potential intensity increases that can shift away from longstanding and locally serving businesses. So, in preferred alternative to that red line in the Hangman Valley, there was actually a longstanding local business that was there, that had a plan to sell their business to another local Spokane business. And given some issues with the sale, that transfer was deemed infeasible and now that property is considered for higher intensity development. And so I think just from a concern about displacement of community serving uses, and reduced opportunities for small business owners in this corridor should be considered from an ethical perspective. Clearly the rest of this corridor- And you're at time, Brian, so if you can wrap up your comment. Okay. All that is to say, I don't think there is enough content within any of the preferred alternatives to really shore up the connectivity and habitat conservation of this corridor, and would appreciate that in future iterations of the preferred alternative. Thank you.