Olympia Land Use & Environment Committee to add more staff positions

Olympia’s Land Use & Environment Committee (LUEC) discussed the 2023 Community Planning and Development (CPD) Work Program Update on Thursday, December 15.

The city staff annually delivers work items for the upcoming year to the LUEC regarding major city planning projects conducted by multiple city departments.

“We have ongoing programs, which identify our number of FTEs or full-time equivalent staff [to] 8.25, which is the level we've been at for several years now. That's actually five people for FTEs,” CPD Deputy Director Tim Smith said.

For the succeeding years, Smith shared that they are planning to add three more FTEs, including Planning Commission support.

Smith also discussed the long-range planning projects in store for 2023, “We're doing a charter and cross-department team establishment. The city has an internal team that's starting to work on both the public outreach component and then the individual elements.”

The projects included will have elements spanning the natural environment, transportation, public health, arts, parks & recreation utilities, and the economy, said Smith.

“Those elements are all that we worked on by the staff with expertise in those areas, drafting amendments, and then going through a very public process for input. So that's going to start next year in earnest,” Smith added.

Olympia Planning director Leonard Bauer stated that the committee would have a public process going on, as well as an open voting process on every single element of the plan.

“If there's somebody who wants to bring something up during that public process, they don't need to go through a formal docketing process,” Bauer said.

The recent LUEC meeting was for discussion only, and no action was requested from the committee.