At Tuesday night’s Edmonds City Council meeting, the council spent the bulk of its time working on proposed amendments to the city’s critical areas ordinance, and ended up approving three of them.

More work will need to be done on other amendments in coming weeks.

The council had a 60-minute public hearing, followed by about 40 minutes of discussion on the ordinance, which is required by the state’s Growth Management Act. It governs the city’s wetlands, streams and geologically hazardous and frequently flooded areas.

The city is required to update its ordinance every 10 years, with the updated version technically due to the state in 2015.

The Edmonds Planning Board started work on the critical areas ordinance update in 2014 and presented its recommendations to the city council in September 2015. The council made its own amendments and approved the ordinance on Dec. 15, 2015. The mayor then vetoed the council-approved ordinance and the council has been working to submit new amendments, which were the subject of Tuesday’s public hearing.

The list of proposed amendments were presented and then the floor was open to public comment.

During the public hearing, some speakers did not address any specific amendments but stated they wanted to emphasize the need to protect these critical areas. One speaker, a developer, commented that the city’s requirement under the ordinance for “peer review” was unnecessary and overly costly for approval of projects. Another speaker agreed with one of the amendments that tree canopy coverage would be better addressed in the city’s Tree Board regulations, rather than in the critical areas ordinance.

An area of contention during the hearing was the height requirements along the waterfront and provisions for rising water levels due to global warming. In particular, there was concern for the proposed Edmonds Senior Center and where to measure the base from. Senior center planners propose that the base level be increased by 3 or more feet to account for rising sea levels. However, adjusting the base level will allow for the building height which also go up by the same amount. Those who feel adamant about not increasing building heights do not feel that this is appropriate.

Several students from the Edmonds-Woodway High Schooll Save Our Salmon group and other parties stressed in their remarks the need to protect the marsh by daylighting more streams to help preserve salmon runs and habitat for increasingly endangered species.

Several speakers commented that the city should inventory critical areas and produce a list so that property owners and potential buyers would know if the property they are dealing with is considered a critical area. While the city maintains that this is an overly burdensome project the speakers felt that such a listing could be done relatively easily and would provide much better direction.

Following the public testimony, the council decided to go over the amendments to see if there were some that they could agree on.

The council approved the following three amendments: (You can refer back to the full list of proposed amendments at this link.)

1. ECDC 23.40.220.C.4 – Physically Separated/Functionally Isolated Buffers
   a. Require determination of physically separated/functionally isolated buffers to be made by a qualified critical area consultant.
   b.  Rename provision to physically separated/potentially isolated or “interrupted buffer”

4. Definitions
   a.  ECDC 23.40.320 – Normal Maintenance of Vegetation Definition
   Change the diameter of trees from three to four inches dbh which may be removed as “normal maintenance.”
   b.  Add definition for Council to reflect Edmonds City Council
   c.  Add definition for Best Available Science Remove
   d.  Move definitions from Part VI to ECDC 23.40.010 after Purpose section.

11. ECDC 23.40.040.D – Areas Adjacent to Critical Areas
    Keep only first sentence and delete the remainder of the section

The remainder of the amendments will be discussed at upcoming meetings.

To see more details, you can view the actual 93-page ordinance here.

The next step for the council will be to determine at its April 5 meeting which of the proposed amendments should be added to the ordinance. This would be refined on April 12, with the hope to approving the final ordinance on April 19.

In other actions, the council unanimously approved a contract with the State Department of Enterprise Services to work with Ameresco, Inc. for the Phase 5 energy savings project – Solids Processing Equipment Replacement

The contract involves updating solid waste processing equipment, which should generate over $36,000 in electricity savings and another $70,000 in diesel costs, plus approximately $26,000 in maintenance costs each year. The cost savings will pay back the capital costs of the project in 27 years. Ameresco facilitates the selection of the contractor and guarantees the installation and also the energy savings.

During council comments, several councilmembers encouraged the city to continue to monitor potential problems from rising sea levels.

The council also met in executive session but came back after the executive session was over and said there would be no action as a result of it.

— By Harry Gatjens