In a letter that will be sent to the governor's office this month, Washington's Growth Management Hearings Boards are poised to recommend that their three boards should be consolidated into one. How this new board will be structured is still open to debate.
The letter will accompany a study, titled the "GMHB Efficiency Study and Restructuring Analysis," which was commissioned by the boards to analyze several different restructuring options. After hearing feedback on the options from several key stakeholder groups at their annual meeting in Edmonds last Thursday, the boards appear to be leaning toward recommending a single seven-member board with two representatives from each of the three current board regions and an additional at-large member to handle administrative duties.
There are currently three separate boards—Central, Western, and Eastern—with three positions each, although one position on the Western Board is vacant. The boards, which hear and decide challenges to local jurisdictions' comprehensive plans along with issues arising under the Shoreline Management Act (SMA) and the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA), were established when Washington's Growth Management Act (GMA) was enacted in 1990. The separate boards are intended to ensure that petitioners from a given region have their challenges heard by board members from the same region.
The boards' recommendation may not match the final recommendation of the study—due for completion by Oct. 15. The latest draft of the study recommends only a six-member board. Most board members currently prefer a seven-member board due to concerns about future caseload.
New Legal Issues Might Increase Board Caseload
The current draft of the study indicates that the boards' caseload may decrease in the near future because the scope of the GMA has been clarified after 20 years of challenges before the board. However, feedback from key stakeholder groups at Thursday's meeting indicated that these projections might have been too optimistic.
According to Sandy Mackie, an attorney speaking on behalf of the Association of Washington Business, the boards might be presented with several new legal issues in the near future.
New Commerce Rules
Mackie said that new administrative rules recently promulgated by the Washington State Department of Commerce—which was formerly known as the Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development, or CTED—were likely to prompt new challenges to previously litigated issues under the new rules. (For a summary of the new rules read Northwest Hub's coverage here and here.)
Agricultural Critical Areas Issues
A report due out later this year could result in the lifting of a moratorium on legal challenges to comply with the GMA-required Critical Areas Ordinances in agricultural areas as soon as 2010, Mackie said. The report, known as the “Ruckelshaus Report,” is required by legislation signed into law by Governor Christine Gregoire in 2007.
Shoreline Plan Updates
Finally, state law currently requires local Washington jurisdictions with shorelines to update their Shoreline Master Programs by December 2014. The deadlines are staggered over the next several years.
"There is no consensus on these issues," Mackie said to the boards. "You're the referees."
Other stakeholder representatives at Thursday's meeting included Eric Laschever, of the Washington State Association of Municipal Attorneys, and Tim Trohimovich, planning director for Futurewise. Both Laschever and Trohimovich largely concurred with Mackie's assessment of the legal issues that could present additional work for the boards in the years ahead.
Several board members indicated that these new concerns about future workload had caused them to reconsider their comfort with the study's current recommendation of a six-member board.
"Once we go down to six [members] and find out we're a little overwhelmed, we're not going to get that seventh member back," Western Board member James McNamara said.
Eastern Board member Ray Paolella agreed, noting that there was a gap between future caseload projections in the draft study and what they heard from stakeholders at the meeting. He also expressed confidence that this problem could be mitigated somewhat by going to one board instead of three, since the amount of cases heard by the Eastern Board is substantially less than the amount heard by the Central and Western boards. "This should help to address some of the imbalances and fluctuations," Paolella said.
One board member disagreed with the majority and advocated for shrinking to six members. "Even going up a little bit [in caseload] is not shooting yourself in the foot," Eastern Board member John Roskelley said. "It means spending a little more time in front of the computer."
One idea that seemed to have a consensus of support among board members was a proposal to draft retired board members into temporary service to deal with intermittent spikes in caseload. However, such authority would have to be granted to the board by the legislature.
Preserving Regional Representation
Several of the stakeholders that appeared before the boards at the meeting on Thursday expressed indifference at the number of members the boards finally settle on for their recommendation, as long as the consolidated board is able to continue issuing timely and consistent decisions. However, they did express concern about the preservation of regional representation.
According to Trohimovich, keeping regional representation is vital to maintaining the legitimacy of the boards in the eyes of stakeholders and the public. He used some humor to illustrate an example of the type of illegitimacy problem that might arise if the boards did not have balanced regional representation. "Ideally, I'd want all of our cases to be heard by board members who live in downtown Seattle and Capitol Hill," Trohimovich said, adding that those decisions might not be seen as legitimate by parties from rural areas.
Most current proposals in the draft study keep some form of regional representation. The study's current recommendation of a six-member panel would maintain the three existing regions. Under the recommended proposal, cases would continue to be heard in the regions from which they originate by panels featuring a majority of members from the region.
Both seven-member board proposals in the study also keep some form of regional representation. The proposal most board members seemed to favor includes two members from each of the three existing regions and one at-large member. Each case would be heard by a panel consisting of the two members from the same region the case originated in and a third member from outside the region.
A Cost-Saving Effort
The boards are already in the midst of cost-saving efforts in response to the 16 percent cut in the Boards budget for the 2009-2011 biennium. In the past year, they have closed offices in Yakima and Seattle, and consolidated their administrative functions into one office in Olympia. Additionally, one vacant position on the Central Puget Sound Board has been left unfilled by the Governor.
According to Eastern Board member Joyce Mulliken, the boards paid $2,800 to the consulting firm Triangle Associates to perform the study and come up with a recommended course of action for consolidation.
Mulliken expressed concern that the cost savings that would result from any consolidation might not balance out the short-term costs of restructuring. "We have to be careful that whatever we recommend results in a cost savings," Mulliken said. "I guess I would just say, 'don't trip over a dollar to pick up a nickel.'"
According to Mulliken, the cost savings from closing the Yakima office have been largely canceled out by the cost of storage for Yakima office files and supplies. However, she did agree that closing the Seattle office resulted in a significant cost savings.
Political Concerns
Other details in the consolidation proposals could impair the consensus likely required to get a proposal through the legislature this year. For example, the current draft of the study recommends eliminating the requirement that a certain number of board members come from each political party. Most board members and stakeholders present at the meeting expressed an opinion that political affiliation had little to no impact on board decisions.
The boards plan to lobby the legislature to adopt their preferred proposal. However, Mulliken, a former state legislator from Moses Lake, expressed doubt that they will be successful in getting their proposal passed by the legislature this year due to the shortened off-year session and the legislature's other budget priorities.
"It's a 60-day session," Mulliken said. "They've got to pay the bills."
The board letter and the study will be submitted to the governor's office after another board meeting tentatively scheduled for Oct. 14.
