ISLAND COUNTY: County, city disagreement over growth planning leads to unusual change in population projection
Jessie Stensland reports from the Island County Commissioners’ work session of Wed., July 16, 2025 for the Whidbey News-Times. Read the whole story.
An impasse between Island County and the city of Oak Harbor over growth planning reached a critical point this week as exasperated commissioners made a decision that may affect the availability of housing for years to come.
At a workshop meeting Wednesday on the ongoing comprehensive plan update, the commissioners were offered three options by planners and decided to reassess population projects for the next 20 years, revising them downward. According to county officials, that means the city will not be able to expand its urban growth area, or UGA, which is the land outside city limits where urban growth is encouraged and supported. Only property in a UGA can be annexed into the city.
Oak Harbor officials have seemed eager to expand the UGA. In a memo from April, city planners wrote that the UGA will be needed to increase by a minimum of 222 acres to accommodate 1,333 units that won’t fit inside the existing city limits and existing UGA.
Now it looks like there will be no expansion at all.
They Said It
Commissioner Janet St. Clair said she didn’t consider the city to be a “good faith partner” while Commissioner Melanie Bacon said she was disappointed in the city. Assistant Planner Emily Neff expressed frustration that city planners were unwilling to provide more details about their capacity analysis.
“In the case of an appeal, we would need to justify why we’re planning a UGA expansion, and if we don’t have that information, we put ourselves at risk,” she said.
On Wednesday, Neff said that the city would not commit to an annexation plan for the UGA. The city “continues to insist” that developer-led annexations are the only way that the UGA will become part of city limits. But county planners believe that the high cost of extending sewer and other infrastructure makes it unlikely that any developers will build affordable housing in the UGA.
Neff said the city wants the county to rezone the UGA for denser development. She said the county is willing to do that, but it won’t solve the problem.
St. Clair also questioned how rezoning would accomplish density if the underlying need for density is infrastructure, which the city isn’t willing to initiate.
“That’s the Catch-22 we are dealing with,” Neff said, adding that other jurisdictions created annexation plans as part of their comp plan updates.
