2019 Comprehensive Plan
2018-2019 Periodic Comprehensive Growth Management Plan Update
In 2018, the city had a number of property owners request updates to the Comp Plan designations for their property. These requests included both re-designations within the current city limits and expansions of the City’s UGB.
Staff undertook a public participation effort to consider comp plan updates. Those efforts included discussing six different growth scenarios for the City of Woodland. Then the Planning Commission proceeded to review the eight applications within the context of those potential growth scenarios.
The six Growth Scenarios were:
- No Growth. This scenario involved no changes to the growth area boundary and no changes within the current City limits.
- Internal Growth. All growth would be accommodated through comp plan designation changes for land already within the City limits. (Modified No-Expansion)
- Partial Applicant Accommodation. Given the number of applications and the amount of area proposed for Urban Growth Area expansion, the City could choose to include some of that land within its Urban Growth Boundary.
- Full Applicant Accommodation. Plans for the inclusion scenario where all applications are included in the urban growth boundary. (But nothing more.)
- City Proposed Boundary Expansion. The City, using staff's best professional judgment, looked at growth area expansion using logical and practical approaches to eliminate boundary peculiarities. (Assuming full applicant accommodation…but filling in the holes or other obvious inclusions.)
- Woodland Bottoms Planning. Recognizing that all activity within the bottomlands generates impacts (like traffic) in the City of Woodland, the City would look at the practical implication of growth within the bottomlands, including planning for growth impacts that occur in Cowlitz County.
Public input was obtained through a series of open houses, public presentations, workshops, work-sessions, one-on-one discussions, and public hearings. The documents developed during this effort and the staff reports and presentations for each of the individual case requests can be found in the menu directly below:
The Planning Commission held several public meetings to discuss the comprehensive plan update including meetings and hearings on:
September 20, 2018
October 18, 2018
December 20, 2018
January 17, 2019
February 21, 2019
March 21, 2019
March 28, 2019
April 18, 2019.
The Planning Commission decided to pursue Option 3 and review each of the cases on a case-by-case basis. The Planning Commission’s recommendations for the cases were presented to the City Council at a special town hall meeting on April 22nd, 2019. At the City Council May 6th regular meeting, the Council instructed staff to prepare an ordinance for review. Staff prepared Ordinance 1433 for a first reading at the Council’s June 3rd regular meeting with final reading scheduled for July 15th, 2019, when the Washington State Department of Commerce review period is complete.
As a result of the update efforts, the City Council adopted Ordinance 1433 making three changes to the adopted comp plan map and one change to the comp plan text. No expansion of the urban growth boundary was approved.
The City Council cited the need to complete several pending studies before it felt that an expansion of the UGB would be defensible. Those studies include a review of the interchange at Exit 21; a review of urban service needs for the industrial area west of the railroad tracks; and the utility rate study which will affect capital facility funding. The Council expects these studies to be completed by early 2020 and expects the City’s next serious comp plan update process to be a 5-year update effort starting 2021 or the required 8-year update in 2024. Until that time, the Council expects the Planning Commission to work on updates to the City’s development codes to ensure the desired tools and structure are in place to support an update which will likely include an expansion of the urban growth area.
