A keystone Pierce County homeless project is facing a new challenge. Here’s what it claims
A Spanaway Lake advocacy group has asked a local court to strike down a Pierce County land-use ordinance that allowed a controversial micro-home village for people experiencing chronic homelessness to move forward on a site near Spanaway.
Friends of Spanaway Lake, a nonprofit, recently filed a petition in Pierce County Superior Court seeking to invalidate the county’s March ordinance that enabled shared-housing villages inside an environmentally sensitive and low-density residential zone where officials plan to construct the 285-unit Pierce County Village.
The petition, filed Sept. 12, argued that the ordinance and two other related measures were enacted with the sole purpose of pushing through a single project — thus constituting spot zoning, which the filing noted was illegal in Washington — and also failed to follow county code procedures for a site-specific rezone.
“I think trying to pass an ordinance with the objective of getting one project vested, and that kind of being the mission of that ordinance, that’s essentially spot zoning,” attorney Gabriel Hinman, who’s representing the nonprofit, said in an interview. “And that is what we’re challenging.”
County representatives declined to comment, citing a practice of not publicly addressing pending litigation. The nonprofit Tacoma Rescue Mission, which is the village’s owner and operator, is named in the petition as an “additional party.”
William Lynn, an attorney representing the rescue mission, rejected the petition’s allegation regarding a spot zone, which he said “allows a use totally different from and in conflict with those permitted on surrounding properties.”
“Here the uses allowed on the site through the conditional use permit process are residential as are the residential uses permitted throughout the area,” he said in a statement. “The proposal actually has less impact than would single family homes at the density permitted on this property and others in the neighborhood.”
Lynn said the petition was untimely and followed an incorrect process, adding that attorneys for the rescue mission expected to move to dismiss the case “in the near future.”
The county’s zoning ordinance is already facing a challenge from two other groups —- environmental nonprofit Futurewise and Spanaway Concerned Citizens — which earlier this year claimed that it violated the state’s Growth Management Act.
County officials previously said the estimated $62 million village project is protected regardless of the outcome of any formal opposition to the ordinance since the project was vested under the regulations in place at the time its permits were applied for.
To that point, Friends of Spanaway Lake’s petition requested the court rule that the ordinance didn’t and couldn’t result in vested rights for any party. The petition claimed that the county was using vested rights as a manipulation tactic to immunize its alleged spot zoning from judicial review.
Friends of Spanaway Lake was prejudiced, the petition stated, because the County Council’s actions will cause “immense damage to the Spanaway Lake ecosystem in contravention of (the nonprofit’s) core mission.” Two of the nonprofit’s members, Ed Larson and Scott Munson, previously told The News Tribune that the lake would be negatively impacted by anything that seeps into wetlands at the nearby village site off Spanaway Loop Road.
Following the zoning ordinance’s passage this spring, the County Council approved a measure delaying its effective date until after the Growth Management Hearings Board’s expected December decision on the consolidated challenge from Futurewise and Spanaway Concerned Citizens. The council repealed the ordinance in July to stave off the challenge and, the next month, overturned Executive Bruce Dammeier’s veto of the repeal.
Friends of Spanaway Lake’s petition sought for the court to also strike down the ordinance that postponed the zone change’s effective date and the ordinance that repealed both.
“Pierce County’s three ordinances operate to exceed the Pierce County Council’s authority or jurisdiction by unlawfully wielding the legislative power to benefit private interests,” the petition stated.
Project proponents, including county Dammeier and the rescue mission, have said that the Pierce County Village would represent a significant step in addressing the homelessness crisis by creating permanent housing and on-site services in a dignified community for those who are among the longest-struggling residents in the county.
Opponents have generally expressed support for the concept. The project site’s environmental sensitivity, however, has been a concern, including for Democratic Council members who have also raised skepticism about the project’s funding model.
