The County Council last week paused on acting on updating the rules for wetland buffers and critical areas in its development regulations to do more fact-finding first.
Council members asked county planners to come back with further answers on the impacts of altering wetland buffers
The topic might be back before council in early February.
County planners have proposed a set of rules that it said increase protections. Their version maintains a wetland buffer of no less than 75 percent of the standard required buffer width. Another rule change repeals an incentive that gives an up-to-15% reduction for the buffer width distance if it meets certain conditions: If there’s a fence around the critical area, or the critical area is set aside in a separate tract.
The net result would leave less room for housing to retain the wetland buffers, senior legislative analyst Ryan Countryman said.
A package of amendments put forward jointly by County Councilmembers Jared Mead and Nate Nehring uses a 50 percent buffer and keeps the 15% reduction in buffer width distance.
State guidance is a 100-foot buffer for the riparian zone between the edge of development and the formal wetland.
Some 31 people testified last week at a public hearing, lasting about two hours. All but a few speakers from the homebuilder and development community said not to reduce the buffers.
Folks telling council to vote no brought up that ecological wetlands recharge groundwater systems, as Bob Danson from the Olympic View Water and Sewer District brought up, and that these provide habitat in the riparian zones.
The Marshland Flood Control District says modifying the buffers will not benefit agricultural areas.
If the County Council wants viable salmon runs, it must provide habitats that allow them to thrive, longtime biologist Tom Murdoch of the Adopt-A-Stream Foundation said.
“Shrinking buffers will degrade the ecosystem as a whole,” Murdoch said.
The public comment period remains open.
The wetland rules are a part of the county’s 10-year Comprehensive Plan which it was due to update by the end of last year. This is one of the straggling sections. The county is currently on a one-year grace period to get it done, Countryman said.
