Your county oversight needed

If you are a resident or landowner concerned about how water, air, and land resources in our county will be managed for humans, wildlife, and natural occurrences such as wildfire in the coming decades, you should read the County Legal Notices with the eyes of an eagle in the next week or two.  This year, the Omak Chronicle is the county’s official newspaper of record for these legal notices.

According to the County Commissioners’ proceedings, your first deadline for comment on new draft Comprehensive Plan documents will be February 10th. The Comp Plan is the overall guiding document for ordinances governing zoning and population density, subdivisions, building, shorelines, wetlands, open spaces, allowable locations for industrial uses, and more.

However, the associated Environmental Impact Statement analyzes what impacts each alternative course of action in the Comp Plan would have upon living things such as human beings, fish, and other wildlife and their essential resources.  

Although a public hearing on the new draft Comprehensive Plan is planned for February 22, you will have a legal blink of the eye — only nine days — to obtain the new Draft EIS (including a new Addendum), read and comprehend it, and submit written comments by February 10th.

Considering concurrent national events and a global pandemic, the timing and deadlines are less than ideal, to say the least. However, the county is years late in responding to a court order that water, wildfire, and other issues be addressed more adequately than they were in the most recent Comprehensive Plan revision and that the zoning ordinance be considered concurrently.

Please do your best to find some time for thoughtful consideration as to how and why we live here and the best pathways our county can take to provide a sustainable and desirable future in this large, diverse county.

Isabelle Spohn