Planning Commission recommends Liberty Lake Chapter 10 (Economic Development) to City Council

The Liberty Lake Planning Commission voted Aug. 13, 2025, to recommend that the City Council approve the revised Chapter 10: Economic Development, forwarding the document with a staff promise to deliver a cleaned-up draft before council review.

Lisa, city planner, told commissioners she reorganized the chapter, “added employment trends and forecasts and added employment land capacity where I basically evaluated the commercial land capacity relative to projected job growth,” and combined related goals to reduce redundancy. She said the update refocused the history and background to summarize economic development strategies rather than replace them.

The rewrite incorporates recent employment projections and a land-capacity analysis intended to align projected job growth with available commercial land. Lisa said staff’s trend analysis assumed “we're probably in the 15,000, job range.” She also described two housing trend lines the team evaluated—one holding the current jobs-to-housing ratio constant and another using a regression analysis—and said both indicate existing pipeline housing plus planned capacity are adequate to accommodate projected job growth.

Commissioners discussed technical elements of the draft, including density assumptions and floor-area-ratio (FAR) calculations. One commissioner praised Lisa’s treatment of FAR and square-footage issues as bringing the chapter “back into the box.” Commissioners identified typographical and formatting problems in the packet, notably a malformed Figure 2 on page 6 and a chapter heading appearing on the back of a page; staff said those would be fixed in the clean copy.

After discussion, a commissioner moved to recommend Chapter 10 to City Council; the motion was seconded and approved by voice vote. Lisa said she will send the cleaned-up version to commissioners and will forward the chapter to City Council for its Sept. 2 meeting.

Why it matters: The revision packages employment forecasts with a land-capacity analysis so city policy can better reflect where jobs are likely to locate and whether commercial land and housing capacity align with growth projections. The Planning Commission’s recommendation advances the chapter to City Council for formal adoption.

The Planning Commission did not adopt the chapter as a final City Council ordinance; it recommended that council consider the revised chapter. Staff will return a corrected, finalized document to the commission and then present it to council.