Birch Bay in 30 Years?

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Whatcom officialdom is going through a process of determining where the expected number of future residents should live. It is estimated the county’s population will grow to over 251,000 by 2031. That’s approximately 60,000 more than present. (We round these numbers off to emphasize they are estimates, whereas the county’s calculators use numbers like 60,490.)

The state’s Growth Management Act requires counties to create their own growth plans, allocating expected growth to particular areas. Whatcom County is behind and losing out on six-figure state grants. A Growth Management Hearings Board told Whatcom to catch up by June 30. So last fall the County Council formed a Growth Management Coordinating Council to advise on deciding how many of the expected new residents should go where. That group consists of two county council members and the mayors of the seven cities in the county, but not representatives of the two unincorporated UGAs, Birch Bay and Columbia Valley.

The county planning department then began a series of community meetings with an informational website and questionnaires. Thursday, February 5, the Birch Bay Steering Committee sponsored a meeting with Gary Davis and Kate Koch of the planning department. Among their maps was one showing what land the planning department views as available for building.

Informed members of the community found these maps wholly inaccurate. Bill Grant was outraged, citing his own and other properties colored as vacant that are approved and platted for development. Lisa Guthrie, who represents Homestead, was relaxed but nonetheless critical.

Koch and Davis were not devastated. Such happens, they explained, and kept smiling, passing out colored pencils for participants to mark up the large maps arranged conveniently on tables.

In a conversation a week later, Kate Koch (pronounced cook), when asked what medication she used to maintain equanimity, said, “Green tea is enough”.

She said that a few days after the meeting she went back to Birch Bay with staff and the map-makers to look at the questioned properties. Guthrie, as the representative of Homestead, seems to know all the available land in the UGA. She wrote to Koch in an e-mail that, “I do not feel we have near the physical capacity of density that has been assumed.”

If you split the difference between two annual growth rates used by the planners in this exercise (7.5 percent and 4.8 percent) to 6.2 percent and compound out 10 years from the estimated Birch Bay population last year (5,292), you come to 9,094 by 2018.

But this subject is akin to a white glove inspection of a platoon’s barracks before the soldiers ship overseas – purposeful but relatively insignificant because of uncertainty. What is important is that this exercise confronts the Birch Bay community with the need to decide its own future.

All comments are welcomed.



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