Moses Lake Planning Commission approves comprehensive plan

MOSES LAKE — At a nearly four-hour meeting on Thursday, the Moses Lake Planning Commission approved the city’s draft comprehensive plan, which is intended to guide the city’s growth over the next 20 years.

The plan covers not just the city of Moses Lake but the associated Urban Growth Area (UGA) around the city, focusing most on the city’s projected new housing on smaller lots inside or close to the city — referred to as infill — and focusing on improving the city’s existing infrastructure.

Commissioners voted to keep a portion of Mae Valley centered on the intersection of Road 5 Northeast and Road E Northeast inside the UGA originally slated for removal, but voted not to include several blocks of industrial land south of Wheeler Road, including a large portion of county land between Road L and Road N — “The Donut” — that was almost entirely surrounded by the city limits and the UGA.

“We need to reinvest in our core infrastructure and upgrade the visual appearance of the community,” City Manager Allison Williams told commission members. “As we expand, there are areas within the city suffering from gravel roads and disinvestment.”

Williams said there is no community with an airport as large and active as the Grant County International Airport and courting major business investment that is asking people to travel through a corridor with gravel streets.

“That is not a good welcoming corridor,” Williams said. “This plan provides the vision that gets us to this next step.”

The plan also projects that Moses Lake and the surrounding UGA will grow at an estimated average rate of 2.4% per year over the next 20 years, and can expect to add around 15,800 new residents during that time, according to one of the plan’s authors, Kevin Gifford, a senior associate with Seattle-based BERK Consulting Inc.

Speaking during a short presentation at the beginning of the meeting, Gifford said there is enough land within the city limits and the existing UGA boundaries, even with the proposed removals from the UGA, to hold 13,467 new “housing units” to accommodate 38,967 new residents — well above the growth projected.

“You can accommodate quite a bit of growth within existing city limits and the current urban growth boundary,” he said.

While they approved the removal, commissioners were concerned the loss of that large space, currently empty and easily developed land, would make it difficult to build a large number of homes quickly if a large company employing several thousand people decided to locate to Moses Lake.

Commissioner Charles Hepburn said the city needs large areas where hundreds of homes could be built if needed, and that focusing new housing on infill will not be adequate to meet that kind of need.

“We have so much property both in the city limits and in the UGA that is so difficult to develop,” Hepburn said. “In fact, much of it can’t be developed. It’s not profitable.”

Real estate agent Mark Fancher said the city is experiencing the pain associated with economic growth.

“We have to decide as a community, do we want the pain? Do we want the growth?” Fancher said. “I’m not in favor of shrinking the UGA.”

However, both Williams and Community Development Director Melissa Bethel said the city risked becoming “out of compliance” with state law if it did not shrink the Urban Growth Area, and will not be eligible for all sorts of state funding, including transportation and infrastructure grants.

“We are oversized,” Bethel said. “The state knows it, the county knows it.”

Under the Growth Management Act, passed in 1990, Bethel said cities are required to eventually provide essential city services like water and sewer to areas in their associated UGAs.

“Sprawl costs money,” she said. “It costs a lot more than density.”

In an email to the Columbia Basin Herald after the meeting, Williams said there is no set acreage or figure for how much land needs to be withdrawn from the UGA to bring Moses Lake into compliance, but rather a very complex calculation estimates “a net area available for housing the projected population.”

It’s that calculation, Williams wrote, that “indicated the combined city limits and Urban Growth Area are too large.”

Still, commissioners wanted to add major development areas, like Dune Lakes south of town, to the UGA, believing the plan’s growth estimates were much too low and land would be needed to build a lot of new homes quickly.

“We have to be creative,” Hepburn said. “We’re going to grow and grow fast, a lot more than 2.4%, and if the state and county won’t let us, we need to find a creative way around that.”

With their approval, the draft comprehensive plan goes on to the Moses Lake City Council, which must review it, adopt it and make its own recommendation to the Grant County Commission, which has the final say.

The plan must at least be in front of the county commission before the end of October in order for the city to be “in compliance” and eligible for state funding, Williams said.

Bethel told commissioners the plan is reviewed every year, and if something changes, the city can alter the plan.

“It’s not the end of Moses Lake as we know it,” she said. “If we get the growth spurt, we can revisit it.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.

This story has been updated to correct the name of Mark Fancher.