Thurston’s Board of County Commissioners (BoCC) reviewed the 2024-2025 comprehensive plan and development code docket items and scheduled the 20-day public comment period to start this week and end in March.
According to the agenda packet, docketing is an annual process to review and establish a work program for the code amendments.
Docketing ensures public participation consistent with Thurston County Code 2.05 and the Growth Management Act (GMA). The commissioners, community members, or other planning partners may initiate projects.
The Community Planning Division of the Community Planning and Economic Development (CPED) facilitates and conducts this work.
CPED Director Joshua Cummings briefed the board that the meeting was meant to brief the commissioners on the specific docketing items.
“Before we start prioritizing stuff and shuffling things, it's important to know what we have, and so today's conversation is essentially an inventory of the docket items that have been requested to be on the docket,” said Cummings.
CPED Associate Planner Andrew Boughan emphasized that this is a “reset’ or ‘refresh” year for the docketing processes, where the board may put in any projects it considers important in 2045. After the public comment period, the board will add, hold, or remove each item from the docket.
Boughan also presented the docket project sheet, which will require applicants to fill in their information, project description, prior board review, general location map, summary of public comments, staff analysis, estimated process timeline, and staff resource needs.
“A couple [of] years ago prior to this, board commissioners had to flip through tons of documents and pages but what staff has done here is collate all that information onto this one sheet,” shared Cummings.
The board discussed two dockets, including county and applicant-initiated projects: the Comprehensive Plan and Development Code dockets.
The Comprehensive Plan docket contains Projects that change the Comprehensive Plan, Joint Plan, or Subarea Plan policies or maps and is adopted once a year. It has both county and applicant-initiated items.
For this docket, the county-initiated items are the Capital Improvement Program Annual Update, Agricultural Policies and Programs Review - Long-Term Agriculture (LTA) Zoning Update, Nisqually Subarea Plan Update, and Thurston 2045 Comprehensive Plan Update and Code Amendments.
The board also went through applicant-initiated requests:
The Development Code docket will contain projects related to change development and permitting regulations adopted at any point during the year.
For this docket, these are the county-initiated requests:
The applicant-initiated requests for this docket are the Natural Landmark Program, Cannabis‐Related Code Amendments, Shooting Zones (Non‐GMA project), and Fireworks Provisions (Non‐GMA project).
The board is set to approve the motion for the 20-day public comment at its February 20 meeting.
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