SCCF statement about last week’s city council vote to lower the SEPA threshold.

Last week’s vote by the city council to lower the threshold of which projects in Seattle’s urban villages would require SEPA review generated some comments - and this statement from the Seattle Community Council Federation.

EARTH WEEK IRONY: CITY COUNCIL WEAKENS SEATTLE’S PREMIER ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

It is a sad Earth Day to have to announce that yesterday, the City Council unanimously weakened Seattle’s premier environmental law, the ordinance implementing the State Environmental Policy Act. As passed yesterday, Council Bill 116010 exempted from the ordinance all building projects of up to 12,000 square feet, and of up to 30 units (80 units downtown), in urban centers and station overlay districts–the very areas receiving the most growth, and thus most needing the protections of SEPA.

Seattle’s urban centers include downtown areas like the International District, Pioneer Square, Belltown, and Pike Place Market, plus the University District, First and Capitol Hills, Northgate, Lower Queen Anne, and South Lake Union. Station area overlay districts are a radius of a quarter mile from light rail stations at Rainier Beach, Othello, Columbia City, Mount Baker, Beacon Hill, SODO, and Capitol Hill. For people who live or work in these areas, Council Bill 116010 made them second class citizens, removing rights they had (and other areas retain), under Seattle’s ordinance that implements SEPA.

It’s an environmental injustice to deny SEPA rights to people in these areas. Now that the City Council has compromised this important vehicle for citizen involvement, environmental justice may eventually be denied to other areas, too. Any vehicle to stifle citizen involvement is bad for government accountability, and just plain wrong. We are hurt by all environmentally bad projects, not just those in our own backyards.

SEPA for more than thirty years has been crucial for neighborhoods to improve commercial and residential projects that would otherwise ruin the environment. But SEPA is only as strong as the Seattle ordinance that implements it. “White boards” announcing a project and the citizens’ right to comment and appeal are there only because they are required by the SEPA ordinance, which also requires that the applicant analyze a wide range of environmental impacts, including cumulative ones of more than one project.

SEPA also requires that City officials seriously consider public comments, and that they mitigate environmental impacts, or reject a project that cannot be mitigated. If the City approves a harmful project, a member of the public can file an administrative appeal or go to court. Appeals are rare, but the potential that they be filed stops environmental harm and helps projects fit better into neighborhoods.

The claim is that the projects now exempt would not have benefited from SEPA review. But the fact that formal mitigations are not always required is a reflection that improvements are made earlier voluntarily by the developers as a result of the SEPA analysis. When citizens have a right to be involved, SEPA creates a dialogue between them, developers, and the City. This is often informal and results in better projects. We all must work together to create the very best projects for our communities and our city. Developers won’t listen as closely to neighborhoods now that the SEPA ordinance has been weakened.

Within urban centers or station overlay zones, the exempted projects will not receive SEPA’s state protections–no white board, public comment period, mitigation, or appeal. There will no longer be SEPA analysis or action to address air quality, drainage, trees or wildlife, environmental health, light and glare, energy waste, height/bulk/scale, views and the shadowing of open space, traffic and parking, utilities, or landslide and seismic hazards that happen to be outside areas already designated as environmentally critical.
This is a classic bait-and-switch. Those in urban centers and station areas were never told that they would become sacrifice areas uniquely denied environmental analysis, or notice and appeal rights. Neighborhood plans are supposed to empower people, not take away their rights. C.B. 116010 punishes neighborhoods that did plans or accepted rail stations. Doing so undermines democracy and livability alike.

Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development cooked up these proposals in two years closeted with developers and their attorneys, who chafe at citizens’ SEPA rights (and the leverage SEPA gives to a government that cares to use it). DPD left community advocates and public interest attorneys off its advisory committee in 2005 and 2006, and ignored their protests once they got a whiff of what it was proposing in 2007. The City Council’s Planning, Land Use, and Neighborhoods Committee did not correct this omission, and gave a free pass to DPD’s weak and biased submissions. In an important respect the committee’s action was worse than DPD, which didn’t include station area overlay districts among those to lose SEPA rights.

The Seattle Community Council Federation and the City Neighborhood Council wrote separate letters to the City on this issue. CNC’s letter warns that “those very neighborhoods which accepted increased density are now being told to just trust DPD and current administrative practices.” Design review doesn’t even begin to replace SEPA’s protections, and the Mayor’s proposal for incentive zoning would further reduce design review’s value to neighborhoods.

The City Council failed to analyze the issues raised by the SCCF and CNC letters. And it failed to notify stakeholders in the areas that would lose SEPA rights–in fact, neither the Council analyses nor the ordinance itself listed these areas by name or location. Many people do not know that they live or work in an urban center, or in a station area overlay district, whose boundaries cannot be found on the City web site.

And few know that –in Earth Week–the City Council yesterday took away some of their SEPA rights, on projects that are a lot bigger than should be called “minor.” The urban centers and station areas are not even mentioned in this summary of Council Bill 116010 on yesterday’s City Council agenda: “Related to land use and zoning, amending Sections 23.41.004, 23.54.015, 23.76.012, 25.05.800, 25.05.908 and 25.08.425 of the Seattle Municipal Code (SMC) and adding a new section 23.42.044, to change environmental review thresholds for minor new construction, expressed as categorical exemptions in Seattle’s SEPA ordinance, amending related Land Use Code and other provisions pertaining to design review, construction-related noise, construction worker parking, notice requirements, and correcting errors and omissions.”

Design review and other alternatives to SEPA are enforced mainly at the City level, and can be weakened at any time. Because Seattle’s SEPA ordinance implements the state law, Seattle must obey its own ordinance carefully. The state-mandated SEPA notice, comment, analysis, mitigation, and appeal rights are much stronger than the City would do on its own.

The above statement is from the Seattle Community Council Federation. Founded in 1946, SCCF is a coalition of neighborhood associations from throughout Seattle. SCCF has worked for many years to strengthen and defend SEPA as the neighborhoods’ best assurance that growth will be positive rather than harmful. For questions: Chris Leman, (206) 322-5463, cleman@oo.net or Jeannie Hale (206) 525-5135, jeannieh@serv.net.