'The three ring circus'

A JOLT News Investigative Series

In the back half of the 1980s, Washington state was experiencing robust growth. Businesses were expanding and new housing was being built in much of the state. But while prosperity was rising, there was a dark side, too: as new construction expanded to areas beyond city centers, the character of the state’s rural communities was being inalterably changed.

Fueled by the ire of voters dissatisfied by sprawl, the Washington Legislature passed the Washington State Growth Management Act (GMA) in 1989, and then-Governor Booth Gardner signed the bill into law. The GMA came into effect the following year and nothing in Washington has been the same since. 

Following the passage of the GMA, the seven cities in Thurston County, and the county itself, have seen their planning operations transformed.

Today, explicit boundary lines differentiate territory in our community set to be urban in character from areas set to be rural. Property owners on one side of those boundary lines face fundamentally different restrictions on what they can do with their land than those on the opposite side of the street.

Large planning bureaucracies have grown in local governments tasked with the requirement to create and operate complex processes that govern where new businesses or housing construction can be placed, and the costs developers must pay to remediate any traffic impacts that then arise.

Any location where two arterials cross is catalogued, its traffic measured, and its future growth predicted. Should traffic move too slowly, local governments face restrictions on permitting new construction in the immediate area. 

The transformations wrought by the Growth Management Act played out in miniature at a single intersection in the small city of Tumwater starting in 2015. The lifeblood of all municipalities remains new economic development, and for the city to be able to proceed with their ambitious Capitol Boulevard Corridor plan, the overburdened intersection at Capitol Boulevard and Trosper Road would have to overhauled. Doing so would run to the tens of millions of dollars. 

No one likes waiting for a red light. And if we are forced to wait even longer because some developer made money while making traffic worse, well most residents dislike waiting for that red light even more.

As a public policy approach, forcing a municipality to anticipate how their urban planning will impact the community, and making sure those impacts are addressed, holds a lot of appeal. But while the goal is salutary, realizing that goal requires reams of government red tape and a small army of government workers to implement it.

Regulatory regimes like this inherently spawn conflict that leads to lawsuits and GMA compliance litigation generates millions of dollars in fees for law firms across the state. Every cog in this complex machinery adds costs, leading to higher taxes and more costly construction that slows economic growth. 

The great American pastime might not be baseball. Instead, it could be complaining about taxes and "faceless bureaucrats." For instance, a previous segment in this series elicited a comment from a JOLT reader who wrote "It seems (city) staff, whose salary we, the people are paying, just sit around wondering how they can make someone's life more miserable..."

While this reader does not appear to be a fan of roundabouts (or apparently government employees), it’s easy to bemoan the choices city workers have to make to comply with the Growth Management Act. But it might be instructive to consider what Thurston County would be like without the GMA.

An instructive example can be found on the other side of the country. In North Carolina is the small town of Pittsboro. In 2013, the town’s planning commission approved the creation of the Chatham Park planned residential community. This development, which looks lovely, is expected to eventually house 50,000 people in over 20,000 homes. Prior to the arrival of this housing development, Pittsboro only had 5,200 residents, making it a bit smaller than Rochester. Once the new subdivision is fully realized, Pittsboro will be about the same size as Lacey, making it unrecognizable to the people who lived there before. 

It’s easy to believe that development on the scale of what was approved in North Carolina couldn’t be built here, that there isn’t enough demand for this much housing. But Pittsboro is about the same distance from the employment center of Raleigh, North Carolina, as Yelm is to the employment center of Tacoma. And If you build it, they will come (yes, I know it should be "he will come," but stick with me).

While this scenario might seem far-fetched, it’s worth remembering that if the Country Green Turf Farm were converted to a housing development and assigned Lacey’s least-dense residential zoning level, over 3,000 single-family homes would fit. Just from the conversion of one rural parcel. Yet, because of the Growth Management Act, that can’t happen. It is up to the reader to gauge whether that tradeoff has been a worthwhile one.

Take the completely unscientific poll below to show how you would prioritize government spending (Scroll through the entire survey and stack rank each option. Make sure to click Submit Vote when done. No need to Sign In or Sign Up. Choices are presented randomly.)

The three roundabouts that were built as part of Tumwater’s Capitol Boulevard and Trosper Road Intersection Reconfiguration project were intended to relieve traffic congestion at the city’s most important intersection.

To date, the city’s Engineering Department has not officially measured the new intersection’s Level of Service performance, so the verdict on that effort is not yet in. But this writer’s observation is that all three intersections are performing more efficiently than they were before they were redesigned: drivers rarely have to wait more than a few seconds to traverse the crossing. Typically, they don’t have to wait at all. Whether this justifies the $20 million expense is in the eye of the beholder. 

The Washington Growth Management Act has fundamentally altered the character of Thurston County and will continue to do so. The GMA has meaningfully reduced urban sprawl, while creating a complex and costly planning bureaucracy. Every business you trade at and every road you travel is impacted by its restrictions. But love it or hate it, there are no signs that the Growth Management Act will be going away anytime soon. 

Read previous installments in this series on The JOLT News website: 

Part 1: The Creation of Washington’s Growth Management Act 
Part 2: How the GMA Impacts Local Government Transportation Initiatives 
Part 3: Clark Griswold’s nightmare: How Roundabouts Became Traffic Engineers’ Preferred Solution
Part 4: The Three Ring Circus Comes to Town