Oak Harbor planners warn UGA allocation gaps could leave thousands of housing units unaccounted for

Oak Harbor principal planner Kat Cammack told the Planning Commission on Aug. 12 that Island County'wide Planning Policy (CPP) allocations assign roughly 5,500 housing units to Oak Harbor and its urban growth area (UGA) over the next 20 years, but the city's current capacity under existing regulations covers roughly 2,500 to 2,700 units.

"We control what's in the city, but we do not know exactly what that number should be," Cammack said, describing how the allocation was assigned to the UGA rather than solely to Oak Harbor city limits and how that requires coordination with the county because many UGA parcels remain under county zoning and permitting authority.

Cammack said the city hired a consultant to produce a landscape capacity analysis following countywide planning policy procedures. That analysis estimated existing capacity at about 2,500'2,700 units of the roughly 5,500 assigned. The city then prepared a land-use options memo and provisional regulatory changes'including increased height limits in several zoning districts'that would add "about a thousand or so units," bringing modeled capacity to about 3,500 units under the proposed…