An effort to develop a master plan for the Woodland Bottoms has taken another step forward as stakeholders and government officials met for an inaugural meeting based on a recent agreement between the city and the county.
On Aug. 9, stakeholders involved with joint planning of The Bottoms laid out major concerns as the city and county begin dialogue about land use in the region. In June, both the Woodland City Council and the Cowlitz County Commissioners agreed to a “memorandum of agreement” to plan for the area, which covers all the land south and west of city limits, bounded by the Lewis and Columbia rivers, and northeast of Woodland between the Columbia River and Interstate 5.
The agreement marked a change from months of contention between the city and the county’s plans for the area. At one point, the county made legal threats to the city’s efforts. Now, both governments are meeting at the table.
“We’re going to do everything we can to try and make this a successful effort,” Woodland Community Development Director Travis Goddard said.
Goddard said the process was moving faster than initially expected. Cowlitz Consolidated Diking Improvement District 2 has stepped up and hired a consultant to look at The Bottoms, which Goddard said was a positive development for the joint planning process.
He also mentioned a letter from the Washington State Department of Commerce. The department expects Woodland to follow Clark County’s deadline for the periodic review of the city’s comprehensive growth management plan. Though mostly in Cowlitz County, Woodland plans under the state Growth Management Act, as does Clark County.
Those changes mean the city can’t wait for its comprehensive plan update before or after the Bottoms planning, Goddard said, which complicates the schedule.
“I’m hoping that won’t be making things too difficult, but it means we might have parallel conversations going on at the same time,” Goddard said.
Main issues
A driving factor for the planning was the apparent lack of residential opportunity in Woodland. Goddard said, in the latest planning the city has done, Woodland was 125 to 225 acres of developable residential land short of what is needed in the next 20 years. Expanding the city’s urban growth area would allow more land to be annexed, and then development to meet the projected needs of the city.
Traffic was another concern the city has noted. Since joining the city in 2018, Goddard has kept detailed data on traffic impacts on new development. He shared the latest data that showed 80% of traffic growth in the city in that timeframe was due to commercial development.
“We are very aware of the fact that traffic is a major concern in the community,” Goddard said.
An issue the joint planning seeks to address is reconciling the difference between the Growth Management Act-led planning of the city and that of the county, which does not plan under the act. Infrastructure standards are inconsistent in both jurisdictions, which the Port of Woodland encounters regularly, the port’s executive director Jennifer Wray-Keene said.
Planning for port-owned waterfront properties differed from what is done on ones in city limits, she said. In some cases, the port had to take into account the differences while planning for the same road as it cut in and out of the different jurisdictions.
Wray-Keene noted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who have oversight of the dike along the Columbia River, was not present at the meeting. Any development on or near Dike Road would need federal approval.
“That’s the main roadway, and we can’t widen it; we can’t put shoulders on it; we can’t do anything” without that federal approval, Wray-Keene said.
A key decision the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Council of Governments sees is on agricultural preservation in the wake of development potential, council executive director Bill Fashing said.
“The farmland and such, 20, 30, 40 years from now, is going to be fewer and far between, unless we make the conscious decision to protect that today,” Fashing said.
After those determinations are made, planning needs to focus on transportation by developing road corridors and securing rights of way for those future roads, Fashing said.
Wray-Keene said, in some cases, generational farming families want to sell off the land to developers. She questioned whether there was any way to prevent the property owners from turning over their land for more urban projects.
Any development happening in The Bottoms will affect Washington State Department of Transportation roads, said Dylan Bass, WSDOT southwest region transportation planner.
“We need to obviously make sure that we’re providing a transportation network that is safe, reliable, one that allows for mobility,” Bass said. The network also needed to take into account cyclists and pedestrians.
Any urban-level development in the area required urban-level infrastructure, and the funding to build it. Although WSDOT’s budget dwarfs that of the city or county, “the fact of the matter is it’s all appropriated before we get it,” Bass said.
He said The Bottoms plan could be an opportunity for state lawmakers to step up and secure funding.
Although The Bottoms is served by Cowlitz County Fire District 1, Woodland’s district, Clark-Cowlitz Fire Rescue, often handles calls in the area, CCFR Chief John Nohr said. Fire District 1 is predominantly a volunteer department and doesn’t have the resources that CCFR does.
“We just want to see a coordinated development that ensures and allows us as emergency service providers to respond appropriately to calls when they come up,” Nohr said.
CCFR also has an interest in a developed road network, as unimproved roads can prove challenging for the large vehicles needed to fight fires.
County input
The meeting also featured members from Cowlitz County Building and Planning. Wayne Nelson, planning manager for Cowlitz County, said it was “enlightening” to hear directly from stakeholders on their concerns over development in The Bottoms.
He agreed that the differing infrastructure standards between the city and county-controlled land in The Bottoms needed to be rectified. He believed those changes could be made through interlocal agreements outside of the city and county’s individual comprehensive plan efforts.
Identifying what infrastructure is needed would be integral in determining what those agreements would look like, Nelson said.
“I think the county would be fully in support of that effort,” Nelson said.
Where the county disagreed was in expansion of Woodland’s urban growth area into The Bottoms, Nelson said. Goddard’s presentation showed that the city was not hitting the residential growth targets it had planned for.
“The city of Woodland is well under their projected growth from the existing comprehensive plan,” Nelson said.
Stakeholders for the agreement will have subsequent meetings where they will discuss any funding needed for consultants and outreach as the planning moves forward, Goddard said.
