Yelm City Council to vote on adoption of updates to comprehensive plan later this month

The adoption of several updates to the City of Yelm’s comprehensive plan will be up to a vote later this month, but before councilors have the opportunity to decide on these changes, Gary Cooper, Yelm planning and building manager, highlighted the new information included in the plan.

Cooper, who spoke to councilors during a Yelm City Council study session meeting on Tuesday, April 7, said the Yelm planning commission voted to recommend approval of the comprehensive plan to council in December — however, it wasn’t brought to council until April as a lot of the maps included assumed that annexation took place. The new annexed areas officially became final on March 29.

“We’ve already seen quite a bit of activity — people interested in developing and even getting full compliance calls, trees in the right of way,” Cooper said. “We’ve added 1,200 acres. I will give you a heads up that in a couple months, probably, we will be coming back and, assuming you approve it, there are about five or six parcels on there that we want to rezone. A couple of them are these industrial parcels that are going to have good access to the loop when it develops. There is one small commercial parcel, right behind Safeway, which is adjacent to the existing apartment buildings that are there.”

Cooper described the last comprehensive plan as “just words,” and presented members of city council with an illustrated version of the updated plan.

“We kind of illustrated this one. The last plan was like 50-something pages. This is 113. A lot of it has to do with the added photographs and graphics to illustrate,” Cooper said. “In the housing chapter, for example, there’s a lot more information that’s described visually and verbally. I’m planning to bring this to council in two weeks to seek adoption. Then, we’ll be done for another 10 years. We have the option every year to do updates. You can only update your comp plan once a year.”

He added that he could return to council next year with some minor amendments needing approval for maps and “things of that nature.”

“After the annexation, we have someone, right now, doing a census,” he said. “We’ll be required to do a door-to-door census. I expect that we’ll, maybe, get another 1,000 (residents).”

With the comprehensive plan update, Cooper noted that Yelm doesn’t have to rewrite the plan but rather “look at it comprehensively.”

“The three areas that were the most changed, for us, were the housing chapter, the transportation chapter and climate,” he said. “The utilities chapter, there’s not a whole lot you can say. There’s new goals, policies for utilities — although we did add some new maps in there showing where sewer and water, things like that are.”

Cooper noted that housing had a strong emphasis with the city needing to come up with goals and policies for sustaining affordable housing.

On the transportation side, Cooper said that Yelm is required by legislation to start looking at goals and policies to encourage more multimodal transportation, including bike routes, walking paths and walkability within neighborhoods.

“Some policies like allowing, for example, in residential zones for maybe a small convenience store, or something like that, that encourages people to be able to walk to go get their onions as opposed to getting into their car and driving to Safeway,” Cooper said.

More information will follow in the coming weeks.