Gig Harbor staff outline draft critical-areas ordinance changes, schedule public meetings

Gig Harbor's Community Development Director, Eric Baker, briefed the Planning Commission on Feb. 19 on proposed updates to the city's Critical Areas Ordinance, focusing on new buffer ranges for wetlands and streams, public outreach and the timeline for formal consideration. Baker said staff will hold a virtual meeting March 3 and an in-person open house March 10, both at 5:30 p.m., and that the draft and supporting materials are on the city website.

"We're sending out almost 2,800 postcards to people who are located within 300 feet of either a wetland or a stream," Baker said, describing the city's outreach to property owners near mapped features. He said staff will compile public comments into a matrix to inform revisions and expects the formal review process to continue through April and into a final decision before June 30.

Baker framed the proposed changes around three objectives: protect flood storage and water quality, sustain fish and wildlife habitat (including Chinook salmon runs), and provide a predictable, locally grounded approach to buffer widths. He described wetland identification by soils, vegetation and periodic saturation and pointed commissioners and the public to the city's wetland maps and the distinction between a wetland determination (category) and a delineation (edge of wetland).

Under the draft, buffer widths would be set as ranges tied to land-use intensity: high-intensity uses (urban residential greater than one dwelling per acre, commercial, industrial, active recreation) would generally retain larger buffers; low-intensity uses (forestry, passive trails, utility corridors) could use smaller buffers. Baker said the city's "bulk" buffer approach is intended as a practical surrogate for more expensive site-specific analyses, which remain an option.

Commissioners questioned a draft provision that would allow some Category 2 wetland buffers to start at 225 feet rather than 300 feet. "What does the science say that would allow for the high end to be less?" one commissioner asked. Baker said habitat quality and hydrologic connectivity drive the rationale and promised to provide more detailed written justification from the best-available-science review.

On streams, Baker said the draft sets a 100-foot minimum for streams that feed shorelines or connect to fish-bearing reaches and that Type 2 and Type 3 streams (reclassified in the draft as fish-related types) would see larger buffers in many cases. He also described the Department of Fish and Wildlife's recommended site-potential-tree-height approach, which can yield much wider, species-dependent buffer widths but requires expensive, site-specific analysis.

Baker acknowledged implementation trade-offs: wider buffers will reduce developable area in some locations and could require more mitigation or off-site options. He discussed wetland banking and regional mitigation as possible tools but cautioned that a bank requires federal and state approvals and significant upfront investment. "We don't currently have a wetland bank in the city," he said, but staff will watch peninsula-wide efforts and potential Navy mitigation opportunities.

Next steps: staff will collect comments from the March meetings, prepare a staff draft and then the Planning Commission will hold a public hearing and make a recommendation to the City Council, which will hold a subsequent public hearing before a final decision.

The commission did not take a formal vote on the ordinance at this meeting; Baker recommended commissioners review the materials and bring specific questions back at the next briefing or in the public hearing phase.