Shorelines Management Program Update

I attended two of the Shorelines Management Program update meetings last week.  The first was on Monday with the Chelan County Commission and the second on Wednesday with the City of Chelan Planning commission.

After hearing the questions and concerns from the County Commissioners, I felt much better about the direction they would like the process to go.  The draft of the SMP Update that was on the web sites and we linked to, was apparently not meant to be widely distributed to the public, although it was on publicly accessible web sites.  It was a draft to the various groups and stakeholders who have been working on the project before a draft for public review.

That “public” draft is scheduled to be out sometime in May, although that could be delayed.  I will let readers know when it is available and get links to the documents for your review.

There will be a lengthy public review process and adoption of the plan is not scheduled to occur until sometime in 2010.

Great comments were made in both meetings I attended about the public access, particularly from private property, that was in the preliminary draft.  While it is clear that additional public access is desired, the approach that was written into the early draft was not well received by the attendees to the meetings.

In spite of the document getting a bit more attention then may have been originally planned, good feedback was given and received about dimensional, structural and other issues within the preliminary draft.  A variety of approaches to addressing the likely lack of concurrency of the final SMP to  changing of other permitting agencies was also discussed including not having standards in the Chelan County document that are already covered by other agencies.

There were other meetings in Leavenworth and elsewhere in the county.  Please add comments if I missed something or with your thoughts.

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