Conservationists make last ditch effort to stop 1,000 homes being built on undeveloped Spokane woodland

Conservation activists are gearing up for a final attempt to slow down or stop efforts to develop a wooded area into housing near Thorpe Road on the western end of Spokane. They argue the land contains increasingly rare geological, ecological and cultural features that could be lost beneath pavement.

Redmond-based Blue Fern Development, meanwhile, hopes to use a Dec. 4 public hearing on the issue to convince activists and the rest of the community that plans to build as many as 1,000 homes on the land would boost the city’s insufficient housing stock and bring needed funding to bolster overburdened transportation infrastructure, while still keeping much of the land available for the public.

“It’s development. You can’t get around that, but there are some really good things that can come with development,” said Benjamin Paulus, CEO of Blue Fern.

Under Blue Fern’s initial plans, a considerable amount of the proposed Latah Park housing development would be set aside for existing trails, a new park and some kind of civic use, such as a school, community center, firehouse or other purpose, Paulus noted.

Not everyone is convinced, however, the benefits can offset the damage done to what little is left to the city’s undeveloped land, nor that funds from the development can offset the harm of adding hundreds of additional people and their vehicles onto roads that have been underfunded for decades. New development is already paused in the area after the City Council approved a moratorium in May, citing failing roads, insufficient emergency vehicle access, poor evacuation routes and a desire to plan to address those issues before allowing new growth.

However, any development on this property is years away at the earliest, Paulus said, so it theoretically wouldn’t be blocked by a moratorium.

The 160-acre property south of Thorpe Road is a small part of the Department of Natural Resources’ Common Schools Trust fund, 3 million acres of land managed by the agency to produce nontax revenue that pays for, among other things, building schools. This revenue is typically generated through leases, including leasing woodlands to logging companies.

The Thorpe Road property is relatively unproductive, however. It is unable to grow trees for logging at the same pace as comparable -sized land in the Cascades or Western Washington. So the department has been looking to unload the property, according to agency spokesman Joe Smiley.

The city of Spokane applied earlier this year to a competitive program where, if approved, the Legislature would pay DNR for the land and then transfer it to the city at no cost.. There are no major city parks on that side of Highway 195, and the land transfer could have provided opportunities to change that while also conserving natural lands inside city limits, Parks and Recreation Director Garrett Jones said in February.

But there is limited funding available through the Trust Land Transfer program, and, among the 30 applications filed to the Department of Natural Resources, only eight were selected this year. City officials and conservation activists learned in September that the city of Spokane’s application was halfway down the list, ranking 18th.

Within weeks, activists also learned of a new application by Blue Fern Developments. The company has the pending Victory Heights residential development already flanking the woodland on the north and west. The developer approached DNR in October, offering to trade the agency a 4-acre commercial property in Whatcom County with a Haggins grocery store in exchange for the Thorpe Road land.

Some elected officials and activists are now questioning whether the city’s proposal was unfairly graded, arguing that the Spokane Tribe of Indians were not adequately consulted and that this dragged down the application’s score. They have called on the department to pump the brakes and provide more time to rally opposition and provide alternative plans for the property.

Councilman Paul Dillon plans to put forward a resolution at the Dec. 2 council meeting asking the agency for more time. The agency is hosting a public hearing at 6:15 p.m. on Dec. 4 at the Downtown Spokane Library, which may be one of the last opportunities for the public to weigh in before Blue Fern’s proposal goes to the Board of Natural Resources for a final decision that could come as soon as January.

What could be gained?

For decades, population growth in Spokane has outpaced investments in the services needed to sustain that growth, such as roads or water and sewer systems, and few places have been more strained by this mismatch than the Latah Valley.

The Spokane City Council last September voted to pause all residential construction for six months in the Latah-Hangman and Grandview-Thorpe neighborhoods, where city leaders blamed the problems in large part to insufficient fees paid by developers to mitigate the problems caused by growth.

During that first moratorium, the City Council approved major overhauls to those development fees, steeply increasing how much developers pay to improve local roads, for instance.

But the City Council, believing these increased fees would not be sufficient to make up for decades of neglect, approved a second moratorium in May, this time for a full year. The additional time could be used to draft specific plans for improvements and to change development standards to halt growth in areas that couldn’t handle it, supporters argued.

Between the Victory Heights project, which is already in the development pipeline and expected to bring more than 1,000 homes to the Latah Valley, and the neighboring proposed Latah Park development that would be developed years later and bring between 500 and 1,000 more homes, Blue Fern’s project could have a sizable mark on the neighborhood.

While all of those homes will also bring thousands of more vehicles to already strained roads, Paulus also believes projects of this size may be the only practical way for the city to pay to fix those same transportation issues.

“I think everyone would agree the traffic infrastructure is already broken, and it needs to be fixed, and we are actively working with our Victory Heights project with the city and WSDOT to come up with the large scale solutions to fix the problem,” Paulus said.

Paulus argues that the dual projects will bring enough development to put a substantial amount of money aside for infrastructure improvements, a “critical mass” that allows the city to make up for lost time, especially if the city were to implement a tax increment financing system similar to what was leveraged to develop Kendall Yards.

In 2007, the Spokane City Council approved tax increment financing for that project, with 75% of increased city and county taxes generated by the site being siphoned off for 25 years to pay for infrastructure like sewers, streets and water mains that the developer needed to build homes and businesses on the land north of the Spokane River.

“If you have a small project, you’re talking thousands (of dollars in fees), but if you combined these sites … and if you do a TIF, and it’s substantial, you have enough money to pay for the major infrastructure improvements on Thorpe and 195 that need to get fixed,” Paulus said.

Councilmen Michael Cathcart and Jonathan Bingle, who voted against the recent moratorium, made similar arguments at the time, positing that only development could bring the kind of money necessary to fix expensive problems with the area’s infrastructure. Dillon is more skeptical, insisting that Blue Ferns is promising more than it can deliver given the extent of the current deficiencies.

Paulus also believes the proposed park and space set aside for some kind of civic building could be a major boon, not just to the neighborhood, but to the larger Latah Valley.

What could be lost?

Jeff Lambert, a conservationist known as “Mr. Dishman Hills” who served until 2022 as the former executive director of the Dishman Hills Conservancy, believes what can be gained by developing the parcel does not outweigh what would be lost.

“I get the development perspective, but they can’t do anything out there that enhances the natural lands,” Lambert said. “They can only harm the wildlife habitat and ecological values that are there.”

DNR considers the land to be of relatively low ecological importance, Smiley said. Lambert disagrees, pointing to sections of bog and undisturbed wetlands that are “in fact unique in Spokane.”

Author and naturalist Jack Nisbet notes the cultural value of the area, including as habitat for plants used by the Native peoples like biscuitroot and bitterroot. Special mapping images of the area show Mima mounds, geological phenomena whose origins remain debated to this day but may be connected to ancient flooding, that survived despite some limited history of farming on the property.

Centuries of development and agriculture have disrupted and erased many of these geological features, which were once widespread, Nisbet said.

“If it goes away, there’s just not a place like that left nearby,” he added.

Dillon hopes that additional time would make it possible for the city, or possibly the Spokane Tribe of Indians, to reapply for a land transfer, or maybe for fundraising efforts to purchase the property.