GET INVOLVED -YOU CAN HELP!
Parks Survey Ready for Your Input
The county wants folks like us to take their parks survey:
It’s worth doing…and if you think our parks, especially those where kids play and those of historical import, should be protected from damaging jet noise, you can make that point in your own words on question 26.
Island County’s Comprehensive Plan due by Dec. 31, 2025
Throughout the process of updating the comprehensive plan, the public will be encouraged to participate and help shape growth in the country over the next 20 years.
The Growth Management Act (GMA) was passed in Washington State in 1990 to help local jurisdictions manage their growth. The GMA requires periodic updates of comprehensive plans to comply with changes to state law, changes to land use, and updated population growth, housing, and employment projections. During an update, the public has an opportunity to provide input on how and where growth should occur, which will help shape how their communities may look in the future.
The overarching issue is encroachment. The Navy is relentlessly pressing for an ever-expanding footprint that encroaches upon and competes for not only land use specifications but the totality of our soundscape as well. You can help provide important input to the processes that will impact you and your family or business …. reduce the number of Growler operations to the former number of 6120 … or move Growler training to more suitable locations.
Will Extreme Growler Noise Be Addressed in the Comp Plan [1]
- How can we use the results from the eye-opening University of Washington Health Study on the health impacts of EA-18G Growler noise to inform our land use and deal with extreme noise?
- What is the public process for hiring a new public health director?
- Has noise been considered in land-use analyses and have Accident Potential Zones (APZs) been properly addressed as a result of the Navy’s operational expansion at its Outlying Field (OLF) in Coupeville?
The 2021 Air Installation Compatible Use Zone or AICUZ (a military planning study) for the Growler fleet based at NASWI has failed its primary purpose: to provoke compatible land uses that thwart conflicts with local government and the public. That is, land uses surrounding the OLF have been allowed without County restraint, and Accident Potential Zones (APZs), while now called for by the Navy, have not been established by the County.
The same old status quo development practices seem set to proceed in spite of the 2021 AICUZ recommendations. That failure points to a need for strong citizen involvement to ensure that health and well-being safeguards are built into the comprehensive plan.
Here’s the problem: The APZs have permissible uses, but they do not include housing, businesses with several employees, public gatherings, etc. When these zones are established, the property within these zones typically gets re-zoned to compatible use. What happens when an already present use is “incompatible”? The property can be condemned by the government authority having land-use jurisdiction and the property owner can be forced to sell or change the present use to a “compatible” use.
The 2005 AICUZ called for 6120 flight carrier landing operations at the OLF, but the Navy increased that to 23,700 operations in Coupeville, making the impacts on the already implemented land uses four times worse. Between the County’s turning a blind eye to the noise issue and the Navy’s disregarding its 2005 AICUZ land-use planning guide, the citizens have been put into a health and well-being pickle. Let’s fix that.
What You Can Do To Help
The County has provided this website page where you can comment: https://www.islandcounty2045.com/compplan. At that site you can argue that the comprehensive plan must forthrightly address:
- the housing problems made worse because so many homes and potential areas for development are either now or should be zoned as unfit for human occupation due to Growler noise;
- that impacts from Growler noise on human health need to be mitigated, as do the impacts on and childhood learning, which diminishes cognitive function whether at home or at school; and
- that adults and children using our parks and campgrounds need to be properly informed and protected from hearing damage due to extreme Growler noise.
You can comment as many times as you want up until December 31. But don’t delay, do it now. And don’t forget to do that parks survey.
[1] This corrects our November COER Newsletter that had several factual problems in this section.
