King County Critical Areas Ordinances

Because the Citizens' Alliance for Property Rights came into being during the process leading up to the passage of the King County critical areas ordinance package, we'd like to give you a bit of background about our challenges and the issues we face daily.

After a multi-year process, the King County Council passed the three ordinances comprising the Critical Areas package in the early morning hours of October 26, 2004. Starting at 1:30 pm on October 25, they considered 100 amendments to those ordinances but did not make any substantive changes. The votes on the ordinances were all 7-6 with Democrats voting for and Republicans voting against. The ordinances took affect on January 1, 2005.

King County Executive Ron Sims and Councilman Dow Constantine incorrectly target rural landowners as the cause of sprawl and dirty water in King County. Click here to see Mr. Sims' report, released just prior to passage of the ordinances, of how well the current regulations are working. Click here to view a map that is part of the ordinance, showing that rural King County is in great shape compared to the dense urban areas.

One of the many new regulations contained in these new ordinances is a clearing limit for unimproved properties zoned RA. The limits are 50% up to and including 5-acre parcels. Parcels larger than 5 acres can clear 2.5 acres or 35%, which ever is larger. The remaining 50% to 65% of your land will be restricted to growing native vegetation. No mowing, no pastures, no gardens, and no orchards.

Mr. Sims and the Democrat Councilmembers that support these ordinances have convinced their urban constituents that their water will be poisoned or go away completely if rural property owners use their property for traditional rural uses. That is simply a lie! The few water quality issues we have in our county are in the dense urban areas, not the five acre minimum lot size rural area. It is patently unfair to ask the 8,500 rural property owners that have not yet built anything on their properties to mitigate damages caused by the 529,000 county residents who have already built. Preventing the use of a major portion of the few undeveloped rural properties will have no noticeable improvement on water quantity or quality. As only 2% of the total parcels in the county, even taking 100% of those properties would have a miniscule effect on the environment. The hundreds of pages of new regulations don’t have anything to do with “sprawl.” The massive downzones of the rural area already prevent sprawl. The new regulations simply add more cost and hassle to the already onerous process of buying permission for the appropriate use of your property.

Government has traditionally provided public benefits by asking each citizen to provide a small percentage of their resources towards the benefit. Because of the large number of contributors, a substantial amount of money can be gathered to use for the benefit of all without any one citizen being unduly burdened. Most citizens end up paying a share roughly proportional to the benefit they receive.

King County's CAO package requires a small number of citizens, those living in rural King County, to contribute a major portion of their resources (50% to 65% of their land) to provide for a public benefit for all citizens of the county. Those property owners end up paying an amount that can drastically alter their lifestyle — paying far more than any value they receive — while urban citizens receive a small benefit for which they pay nothing.

Asking a few to pay for the benefits of the many goes against all principles that the governments of the United States and Washington were based upon. It is simply wrong and our immediate goal is to do what we can to fix the inequity.