The Edmonds Planning Board held a special meeting Wednesday, July 24 to amend some of the city’s land use and housing goals and policies included in the 2024 Comprehensive Plan update. There are 28 land use goals and 12 housing goals with dozens of policies in each goal category. Some board members wanted to consolidate or remove some of the goals to make the plans easier to manage and understand.

Planning Board Chair Jeremy Mitchell said that part of the theme is to make the goals and policies more equitable so that people who are unfamiliar with the 2024 Edmonds Comprehensive Plan – also known as Everyone’s Edmonds – can easily understand what they mean.

To do so, board member Nick Maxwell suggested that the documents that lay out the land use goals and policies be “restructured” and the board should be provided with a new outline. 

The current draft includes the following topics: growth, equity, Creative District, Highway 99 and subarea, neighborhoods, goals and policies for other land uses, and human services.

“We feel that the districts of Highway 99 and the Creative District are also neighborhoods, and we felt that preventing pollution and protecting our environment was something that applied to all neighborhoods and deserved its own section,” Maxwell said. “So our request was for this outline: Growth, equity, neighborhoods, other land uses, prevent environmental degradation, and human services.”

Board member Judi Gladstone said that the land use goals and policies should specifically identify where they would be applied, whether it is across the City of Edmonds or a narrow range of neighborhoods. She thought that some of the goals and policies could be eliminated, and some of the stated actions should be policies instead.

“There are policies that were in specific areas that really should be citywide,” Gladstone said. “We know the growth we need is around affordable housing…We went through every single policy, and [we have] divided comments on it.”  

Board member Lee Hankins said that by concentrating on goals and policies around “diversity in housing, people policies and administrative framework” the planning board is excluding the rest of the city.

“I think it was the common opinion that the document as written tends to focus on a great deal of low-income and affordable housing,” Hankins said. “I think we all understood that, but to the exclusion of every other type of home in Edmonds, which comprises about 80% of the population. People are going to sit and review this in town hall [and] may look at this and go, ‘This doesn’t apply to us.’ In other words, we talk about keeping the character of Edmonds…and keeping the neighborhoods that are currently existing as they are.”

Hankins added that there is nothing in the goals and policies that state growth should occur in existing neighborhoods – only in low-income neighborhoods.

Edmonds Urban Design Planner Navyusha Pentakota pointed out in the document that while many of the goals are focused on increasing affordable housing, “the housing element should provide general guidance for housing throughout the city as well since development will occur there even if it is not targeted housing needed for growth management goals.”

Washington State’s Growth Management Act (GMA) requires that cities and counties update their Comprehensive Plans on a periodic schedule. The purpose of the 2024 update is to ensure the city is planning for the next 20 years of population and employment growth. It gives the city an opportunity to review and revise the plan and development regulations to ensure they comply with GMA requirements.

The City of Edmonds must comply with new state housing legislation and needs to accommodate the expected growth of 13,000 people over the next 20 years, as required by the GMA. According to GMA projections, these new residents will require 9,069 new housing units, and Edmonds currently has the capacity to add only 5,000 units. Also, Edmonds has the capacity for 2,548 jobs, and 510 additional jobs must be added.

The planning board held two public meetings in May to share the latest updates of the Comprehensive Plan, which include shifting land use from building single-family homes to constructing multi-family housing and mixed-use buildings. The board is now incorporating community feedback into the plan, including the following changes:

• Focus growth in areas with existing infrastructure, parks, schools and transit.
• Discourage development on long corridors.
• Update future land use designations and zoning regulations to reflect changes.
• Distribute growth in centers and hubs.
• Promote accessibility and inclusivity in public gathering spaces.
• Encourage mixed-use land development (not just single-family homes).
• Establish minimum density standards that will support the transit network and increase service.
• Provide incentives to encourage new building types.
• Encourage the City of Edmonds to be more active in incubating art and cultural uses.
• Transition areas along Highway 99 from a single or commercial use to a mixed use with more walkability.

Hankins suggested that the goals and policies should be “more balanced” so that they include all areas of Edmonds, not just the low-income neighborhoods.

“I think we’re going to have to defend this in front of [the public, and there’s a lot of folks who are going to sit in a town hall meeting,” Hankins said. “And those folks are typically not the ones who are going to be part of the low-income and affordable housing discussion. And they’re gonna say, ‘Uh-uh, I don’t want you to change a thing on my street.’ If it’s not going to be written in a little more balanced format, it’s gonna set off a lot of alarms.”

During its Wednesday meeting, the planning board addressed the conflicting land use policies, particularly LU-1.1 and LU-2.3. Policy LU-1.1 directs new development in areas that already have infrastructure and services, such as active transportation networks, water supply and utilities. Policy LU-2.3 states that investments should be made in underserved neighborhoods, such as those with “inadequate transportation, a lack of green spaces, poor utility services and deficient community facilities.”

Maxwell suggested two options:

• Not adding more infrastructure and public assets to areas where those are already plentiful and strong, such as downtown Edmonds and the Creative District.
• Allowing development decisions to sometimes prioritize capitalizing on locations with stronger infrastructures and/or public resources, and at other times prioritize equity. 

Gladstone said that promoting growth and development doesn’t necessarily go hand-in-hand with underserved neighborhoods if the growth is directed to the hubs and centers, because those neighborhoods are not always in the hubs and centers.

“We need to have policies that say we need to direct growth at hubs and centers, and we’re going to make sure that these underserved communities are getting the public resources and infrastructure to make them on a similar footing as the rest of the city. So there’s our disconnect,” Gladstone said. “I’m not convinced that if we are sincere about trying to direct the growth of hubs and centers [that the resources are] going to get to those underserved communities.”

Given the two options, the planning board proceeded to amend the land use element to give more consideration to the equity issue. Maxwell suggested that policies “favoring” areas that have adequate infrastructure and resources should be removed. In addition to dropping LU-1.1, he suggested dropping the following sections:

• LU-3.1: Provides incentives and addresses systemic challenges to modernize historical structures, such as accessibility, seismic retrofits and code upgrades to encourage adaptive reuse.
• LU-3.2: Enhance Edmonds’ “imageability” by protecting and leveraging the visual quality of the “5th and Main [Street]” core through ongoing maintenance to fund landscape and high-quality street furnishings, such as public art and civic-scaled features.
• LU 5.1: Invests in key sites in downtown Edmonds and on the waterfront that can serve as “cultural catalysts.”

“More art [and] more sidewalk amenities in downtown would not be the goal for the policy,” Maxwell said.

However, Planning and Development Director Susan McLaughlin said that the Creative District, the waterfront and downtown Edmonds are regional destinations for economic development that receive investments through development partnerships and other sources of funding, which can be redistributed to other areas of the city. 

“City capital should be prioritized in underserved neighborhoods,” McLaughlin said. “Leveraging grants [and] developer contributions in downtown and the waterfront should be the way in which we get our investments.”

Planning board member Steven Li said that he is “not sold” on the options proposed by Maxwell. “If people in the underserved neighborhoods get something, then we have to take it away from downtown,” Li said. “I feel like that’s a losing battle because we do need downtown, the Creative District and the waterfront and the 99 – we need all the neighborhoods to do well in order for that to trickle down to the rest of the neighborhoods. We don’t want just the underserved neighborhoods to do better. We want downtown to thrive as well. I’m wondering if there’s a way to put the language so that we’re investing in all the neighborhoods.”

Mitchell agreed that no neighborhoods should be excluded just because they already have the infrastructure and that all areas should be viewed the same way. However, Maxwell said that the amendments do not exclude any neighborhoods, rather “it just speaks to the timing.”

“[LU-2.3] is an important policy that we think should be pervasively influential,” Maxwell said. 

In the end, the planning board approved by a 5-0 vote two amendments to the land use goals and policies: The first amends one of the equity statements of “goals and policies that promote equity by promoting development” to “goals and policies that promote equity by investing in underserved development.” The second amendment removes zoning of sexually oriented businesses, which are defined by the city municipal code as “commercial establishment defined as an adult arcade, adult cabaret, adult motel, adult motion picture theater, adult retail store or other sexually oriented business.”

The proposed land use goals and policies had included that Edmonds would create a zone or zones for sexually oriented business. But Maxwell said in an email to My Edmonds News that Edmonds does not have to encourage such businesses by explicitly creating a zone for them and does not have to alarm other businesses by telling them “they are now in the red light district.”  

“Many cities around us do not have zoning for sexually oriented businesses,” Maxwell added. “And we have not had such zoning for over 120 years, and it’s working out fine.”

Planning board staff will present these proposed goals and policies to Edmonds City Council on Aug. 6.

— Story and photos by Nick Ng