Making the Case for GMA 2.0

The Growth Management Act was passed by the Washington State Legislature in 1990. According to Rob Wotton, city councilmember in Snoqualmie, at the time of the passage, the state legislature designated the Washington Department of Commerce to develop growth targets for each participating county. The intent was to curb environmental impact and urban sprawl. This body of work was preceded by the Puget Sound Water Quality Authority work that compared the deep fjord waters of Puget Sound with the dying, shallow waters of Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The incentive for conformance would be the distribution of federal transportation dollars that the state handles.

Thirty-five years later since the adoption of GMA, no one anticipated or state's population would grow by more than 1.5 million more residence.

Today communities like Snoqualmie and North Bend have housing challenges as a result. More than 80 percent of the workforce which now exceeds ten thousand employees commute here to work. Meanwhile, over 70 percent of our residents commute to other cities daily for their jobs. Additionally, we lack public transportation options and heavily rely on the Snoqualmie Valley Transportation, a program of the Mt. Si Senior Center, to piece together the funding from the generosity of the Snoqualmie Indian Tribe, and various other resources including federal, state, and county funding to fill the gaps that King County Metro is unable to meet. We are a car-dependent community, and that greatly impacts our local economy in a number of ways.

The shortcomings of the 1990 adopted GMA is the lack of flexibility. Local governments are not consulted. Bureaucrats in Olympia simply assign targets which local governments are forced to challenge and defend their positions. Case in point is the City of Snoqualmie. In 2022, the city was mandated to find 1500 additional homes by 2044. As I pointed out to the King County Affordable Housing committee, we had neither the land or the water to support this. Yet the state through the Puget Sound Regional Council mandated we had to prove this was true. So, the city applied and received a $125,000 grant from the Washington Department of Commerce to prove this. The study underscored this fact. The report was accepted by the PSRC however the vast majority of the reduced hosing target of 719 must be dedicated to of very low-income housing. It fails to address the housing crisis of our workforce, the 80 percent of whom are forced to drive. Furthermore, there is little proof that our local housing needs match the income levels suggested by Commerce nor the lack of transportation and support services that fit the population that is being suggested we provide for.

The make sense solution is to identify local needs first, and allow local communities like Snoqualmie and North Bend to first recommend their plans and have the Department of Commerce assist in identifying a regional and statewide strategy rather than the top-down, centralist planning.

There are other problematic issues in how GMA planning has evolved. More recently, the legislature demanded the department of commerce identify Emergency Housing Needs. These numbers predict a vast growth of homelessness in the state, in our cities like Seattle and Tacoma, and force outlying cities to absorb multi-fold increases of homeless and unsheltered to support with already strained public services without requiring the state to prove the resources exist.

To assist local jurisdictions, we are matching the Commerce numbers assigned to each city in King County with the annual Place in Time report that assesses homelessness in King County.