Monday, March 12, 2012

No Urban Growth at Lake Padden for Now

A bit of old news. Two weeks ago the county council voted 7-0 not to add the Lake Padden area to the City of Bellingham urban growth area lake-padden-again. A tough issue for at least some council members. A fair bit of grant money had been spent on this area with the intent of it being urbanized. But a hard look at the costs of fulling urbanizing and annexing this area into the City of Bellingham has caused Bellingham leaders to rethink this area as a growth area. Lake Padden is still included within Bellingham's own urban growth plan, but city leaders indicated that they did not want to include this at this time given the costs involved.

The County Council majority has been feeling a bit knocked about on their planning efforts over the past two years and realized that going against some good but painful advice was not in the best interest of the county. And it was very good to see City Council Member Jack Weiss provide succinct hard numbers to how expensive the proposed scheme would be to city tax and utility rate players if this area was to continue down the path that past city government officials had contemplated.    

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