[Capr-announce] Rural home size restrictions coming?

[Jeff Wright]

Alert!  Does the County want to confine farmers to small houses or is that
just cover for mandatory small houses in the next Comp Plan?


CAPR requests your help at a public meeting in Issaquah this Thursday, June
14!  King County has laid out its strategy for the GMA 2008 Comprehensive
Plan update.  You remember that KC first down-zoned rural landowners under
the “Sensitive Areas” ordinance.  They then took 50-65% of our land under
the revised “Clearing and Grading” ordinance and further crippled the land
with extreme buffers under the “Critical Areas” ordinance.

Now they are claiming that rural lands are “Legacy Areas” which must be
protected to maintain their “rural character.”  This means that on their
Sunday drives into the country they want to see areas that look like farms,
and everyone knows that farmers should be poor and live in less than average
size houses.  The Council comp plan topics include several demeaning items,
among them “examine limits on home sizes in the agricultural areas.”

Remember that the down-zoning process started out by promising to pay
farmers to give up their development rights under the Farmland Preservation
Program (FPP)?  When they couldn’t get enough takers, and/or got tired of
paying, they mandated zoning to accomplish the same thing with no
compensation whatever.  The same strategy is now being followed to limit
home sizes.

New FPP covenants have been drafted to begin their strategy.  Originally
this was justified as “keeping mansions off of farmland” and keeping
farmland “affordable.”  The language has now morphed into preventing the
building of any home larger than the median size, which is currently 1,950
square feet!  The plan is to promote a taxpayer-funded FPP bond issue, to
buy additional development rights with the 1,950 square foot limit.  (If you
read the attachment of the proposed Development Rights, you will notice that
the specific dwelling size is not specified, but currently that number would
be 1950 square feet and would go down over time!)  By the way, this is less
than 0.5% of the area of a 10-acre parcel.

The Agricultural Commission is being asked to “ratify” the new covenants.
In spite of objections by several farmer commissioners to the absurd home
size restriction, staff has persisted in keeping it in the draft.  At the
same time, staff has recommended loosening the farming requirement to allow
FPP land to simply be in “open space capable of being farmed” rather than in
actual agricultural production.  It would seem that the result will be city
dwellers flocking to subsidized low-income rural housing, instead of farmers
working their land.  All that remains is to furnish large plastic cows and
sheep to “preserve the rural character.”

The big problems actual farmers face are excessive regulations and high
taxes.  Perhaps we need a regulation that limits Council and Executive
offices to the county median office size, in the interest of keeping
government and taxes affordable?  Any other ideas?

Public testimony will be taken at this Ag Commission meeting.
            June 14, 4:00 p.m.
            Issaquah fish hatchery (meeting room south of the main building)

Please come and express your viewpoint, whatever it is.  The Commissioners,
staff and other county officials need to hear what you think!

Jeff Wright
Secretary, CAPR
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