Earlier this month, classical musician Jennifer Godfrey won her case at the state Court of Appeals seeking greater environmental review of the Seattle City Council’s sweeping land use and zoning changes.
Now, a council member wants to eliminate Godfrey’s legal pathway to question assumptions about the impacts of housing construction on water, streams, trees and fish.
It is a small battle indicative of the metamorphosis of Seattle as a place that once valued science and green spaces into a city that erroneously believes the solutions to all its ills lie in unquestioned growth.
A little background.
Last year, Godfrey, a bassist with the Seattle Symphony, didn’t like what she saw as a lack of rigor documenting the impacts of the One Seattle Comprehensive Plan. She appealed the Final Environmental Impact Statement to the city hearing examiner.
The hearing examiner tossed out Godfrey’s case and she appealed.
Attorneys for Seattle argued that building new housing trumps all other considerations and impacts. In the city’s view, no one has the ability to even question whether environmental reviews adequately capture the true impacts of building exponentially more housing — on the environment, gentrification or anything else.
That argument was based on measures passed by the Legislature in recent years to clear out challenges to building projects.
But here’s the wrinkle: Decades ago, the Legislature gave Seattle and other cities the ability to establish an appeals process to review environmental studies before final decisions are made by city lawmakers.
And that’s why the state Court of Appeals agreed with Godfrey: She appropriately pursued legal recourse available to her and others. Given the appeals court opinion, the hearing examiner must now consider whether there is merit to her arguments that the city whitewashed environmental consequences of the One Seattle Comprehensive Plan.
But the court went further, not only defending Godfrey’s legal right, but adding that there was good reason for it.
“Timing of environmental review under SEPA (State Environmental Policy Act) is critical,” wrote the court. “One of the basic purposes of an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) is to ensure that local governments ‘consider total environmental and ecological factors to the fullest extent when taking major actions significantly affecting the quality of the environment.’”
Seattle Land Use & Sustainability Chair Eddie Lin is sponsoring CB 121215, which eliminates the ability of residents to file environmental appeals to the hearing examiner as legislation moves through City Hall. Instead, concerned Seattleites would have to wait until after land-use changes become law and try to go to the Growth Management Hearings Board or hire an attorney and file a lawsuit in superior court.
“I don’t think these hearing examiner appeals benefit anyone,” Lin said from the council dais. “I don’t think that they result in better environmental protections for our city but they do result in significant delays.”
Lin is partially correct: The appeals won’t do any good if the council chooses to do nothing even if serious environmental impacts are uncovered.
Is the hearing examiner besieged with flimsy environmental challenges gumming up progress?
At a briefing earlier this month, a council staffer noted there were only 28 SEPA appeals to the hearing examiner from 2016-2026. Of those, 19 were dismissed or withdrawn. But here’s the thing: They were dispensed with fairly quickly — the average appeal time for dismissed cases was 69 days; 52 days for those later withdrawn.
By comparison, the few cases found to have merit took much longer. The single case where an environmental statement was sent back for review took 374 days.
In other words, where there was a legitimate problem, the process appropriately took time to sort it out.
When clean air, water and green space are under assault across America and Seattle is changing before our eyes, local officials ought to stand up for science and scrutiny and pledge to get right the most sweeping changes in decades.
CB 121215 should go no further.
The Land Use Committee again takes up the proposed ordinance Wednesday.
