New Design Standards for Sequim

For a one-year period, the Sequim City Council will be enforcing new design standards for all new construction. This applies to shopping centers, condos and apartments.

This is supposed to make Sequim more pedestrian-friendly and help retain its rural atmosphere. These design standards will be used for roofs, windows, building entrances, parking lots, signs and trash can location.

The City Council voted 4-2 in favor of these new standards. The four newcomers voted in favor of the ordinance. Old-timers Walt Schubert and Paul McHugh were against it.

Ken Hays, who voted in favor of the design standards, said they're crucial “for a town like Sequim that has so much hope and aspiration to grow into a vital, sustainable community.”

Paul McHugh said the ordinance was "the worst piece of legislation I’ve seen come before the council.” He said if these new standards are enforced on developers, “there is going to be no new construction.”

The ordinance includes forming a 5-member review board to assist the city planning staff. McHugh said this board “is going to have to approve whether you’ve been properly indoctrinated on rural, small-town feel. Business people are going to be furious.” The ordinance, McHugh said, is “an awful, awful document.”

Well, it could be worse. At least it isn't “socialism at its best.”

Voice of Sanity in Sequim

Eric Erichsen — Sequim’s newest city council member — has only been on the job a few weeks and he's already upsetting the Good Old Boy network. Three other new city council members — Ken Hays, Laura Dubois and Susan Lorenzen — will be sworn in on January 14th. Erichsen was sworn in on November 28th since he was replacing a city council member who had been appointed.

Sequim’s voters have spoken, and the three remaining developers’ puppets only have a few weeks left to ram through their puppetmasters’ agendas. So far they’ve gone into a frenzy of rezonings so they can cram as many new buildings into as tiny a space as possible.

Erichsen said that such density is “not what the people voted for just a few weeks ago. The people don't want this.” He was outvoted.

When criticized about Sequim’s runaway growth, Mayor Walt Schubert gave a pious response that “we cannot turn down a development that meets all of the criteria and the zoning.”

But that response doesn’t answer the nagging question of why they keep RE-zoning property every time a developer requests it.