In a quasi-judicial hearing, Renton Council would look for errors in the building application process. Renton Council just decided to no longer conduct these hearings, after the North Renton neighborhood had been told for years that it would happen.

The Renton City Council swiftly made a major policy change at their last Council meeting, sending all land-use appeals to King County Superior Court instead of the Renton City Council.

While the council may have had good intentions with the change, they followed a flawed implementation process that left the North Renton neighborhood feeling betrayed and put in an unfair position.

For three years the Council has told North Renton residents that residents can’t discuss the Logan Six project with Council because it would eventually be sent to the Council for a quasi-judicial review.  At that time, the Renton Council, acting as judges, would formally review all aspects of the entire record of the project and make sure that residents had not been victimized by any errors in the process.  But after three years of telling North Renton residents this, a mere month before the long-awaited quasi-judicial hearing by Council would occur, the Council surprised virtually everyone by canceling their role in the appeals process and all future appeals processes.  Many North Renton residents understandably now feel hurt and betrayed.

The City made at least three errors in their implementation of this policy change that led to this betrayal.  (The policy change may have been reasonable, except for these errors.)

(1) The Council should have given the public better awareness and opportunity to comment on this policy.

This policy change was made swiftly, gliding through Renton’s Planning Commission and then two readings on Renton City Council in less than a month’s time.  Unless Renton residents were carefully monitoring the Planning Commission, which very few do, they would have missed virtually all discussion on this topic.  The group most severely impacted, those concerned about the Logan Six project (which many feel is too large with too little parking), did not have awareness this was coming.

Policy decisions benefit immensely from public input, and this change is so far-reaching that Council should have given ample time for the public to be notified and give input to council.  This is a change that has been discussed by Council in decades past, and has positive and negative ramifications, which the public could have been educated on, and commented on, with leads to my second complaint about the process:

(2) The administration should have presented both pros and cons of the policy change to the Planning Commission and City Council.

The Planning Commission was given a staff statement to base their deliberations on, which gave a positive account of how this change would improve communication between Council and residents concerned about a nearby project. Council would not have quasi-judicial constraints on their communication with residents during the life of the project (i.e. not every communication would have to be formal and on-the-record).

But the administration left out the negative consequences of the change– the reasons that Council has never changed this policy in past decades:  The quasi-judicial council review gives residents an easy and efficient way to appeal Hearing Examiner decisions, that does not require the extraordinary time, complexity and expense of going to Superior Court.  In addition, the Council appeal process ensured that the legislative body itself, the very ones setting the rules and codes, made a thorough review of all documents, and then a determination regarding whether the rules– that they had set– had been followed.  Without this Council review, residents and the King County Superior Court are left to try to try to surmise for themselves what the legislative intent is for specific rules, while residents typically must pay attorneys somewhere between $20,000 – $100,000 to represent them.

The Planning Commission and Council should have been presented with both sides of this argument.  Then Council should have notified the public of a possible change with a press release, and held it long enough to give ample opportunity to hear from residents and builders.  They could have scheduled a council public hearing on the topic, since the existing policy has been in place for many decades, and the change is so far reaching.  An open public discourse regarding this change would have assured that all factors were taken into consideration.  No matter what the final policy choice, Council, residents, and home builders would have understood the rationale without suspicion.

(3). Most important of all, Council should have set the policy for new applications, but not changed the policy mid-process for projects in work. 

They especially should not have changed the process for a project just a month away from it’s Council review, after refusing to discuss the project with residents for three years.  This amounts to a complete denial of legislative representation for the residents impacted.