Planners propose technical fixes to Kitsap County comprehensive plan after hearings-board remand

Garrett Beaulieu, the county’s long-range planner, told the Kitsap County Planning Commission on April 21 that technical adjustments to land- and employment-capacity calculations should address the Growth Management Hearings Board’s remand of the 2024 comprehensive plan.

Beaulieu said the hearings board remanded the plan in August 2025 and set a compliance deadline of June 30, 2026; Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) issued a conditional certification with additional comments. “We were granted an extension until 06/30/2026,” Beaulieu said, noting a public hearing is scheduled for May 11 and the amended ordinance and supporting tables will be posted for public review on April 27.

Beaulieu said the county’s land-capacity analysis assumed redevelopable parcels would allocate 20% of parcel area to future roads and rights of way. Staff reduced that assumption for already-developed, redevelopable parcels from 20% to 5% and applied other UGA-specific tweaks. “This change alone revealed a capacity for roughly 354 single-family units and about 1,052 multifamily units,” Beaulieu said, adding that the change moves the county’s housing capacity numbers from shortfall to surplus in the affected income bands.

PSRC had also flagged employment-capacity concerns in some Urban Growth Areas (UGAs). Beaulieu said the same set of technical changes — including the roads/ROW reduction and adjusted employment-density assumptions — reveals employment surpluses in Silverdale, Central Kitsap and Bremerton. For Kingston, staff proposed increasing the assumed floor-area ratio in the Urban Village Center from 0.32 to 0.60 and reducing ROW assumptions (vacant parcels 20%→10%; redevelopable parcels public-facilities 20%→5%), which staff said generated a surplus of about 82 jobs. Port Orchard’s employment-density assumption was proposed to drop from 500 to 400 sq. ft. per employee (a change staff said was consistent with the county’s 2021 buildable lands data), revealing an estimated surplus of about 95 jobs. Poulsbo’s adjustments — smaller FAR increases and reductions to unavailable-land assumptions — yielded a net capacity change of roughly one job in staff calculations.

Multiple commissioners pressed staff on the mechanics and implications of the technical changes. Commissioner Tammy Bowen said she was “a little concerned about the reduction of the road [assumption] from 20 to 5% and that it’ll give us enough resources to make the improvements, with sidewalks and stormwater drainage,” and asked whether the change was effectively manipulated to meet PSRC requirements. Beaulieu responded that these are analytic assumptions used to estimate capacity and do not change development code or require different frontage work in an actual redevelopment project: “If somebody were to come in on a vacant parcel … there’s no requirement here; it’s just an assumption that in the future this area would densify.”

The Chair and other commissioners asked whether a 5% redevelopment assumption was unusually low compared with other jurisdictions; staff acknowledged it is low relative to some urban areas but said they had reviewed individual UGAs and informally run the numbers by PSRC, which indicated it would support what staff had shown. Director Rafe said PSRC had been consulted on the numbers staff presented and that the final certifications depend on hearings-board review.

Beaulieu said the remand required some additions to the land use element to identify multimodal emergency and evacuation routes and new goals and policies to address wildfire risk; staff proposed adding air-quality and emissions language to the transportation element as PSRC requested. He emphasized that amendments are primarily edits to tables and additions of goals, policies and strategies rather than wholesale changes to code. The county expects to take the amended comprehensive plan to adoption and then to the hearings board review process ahead of the June 30 deadline.

What’s next: staff will post the amended tables and draft ordinance on April 27, hold a public hearing May 11, and then transmit adoption notices to the Growth Management Hearings Board for its review ahead of the June 30 compliance deadline.