Sequim Comprehensive Plan draft delayed to late spring

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, April 28, 2026

SEQUIM — A planned release of a draft of Sequim’s Comprehensive Plan update this month has been pushed to June.

The draft originally was set to go live April 1 with an online public comments period to follow, city staff members said.

Karla Boughton, the city’s director of community and economic development, said there was a delay in consultants’ findings for different elements of the plan. She told the city Planning Commission on April 7 that work on a Transportation Master Plan needs to be recalibrated to align with new state requirements and a sewer consultant needs more time to work on items related to the city’s water reclamation facility.

Boughton said they’ll need another four to six weeks to finish their work.

“While we’re disappointed in the extension, it does give us time to work on code with more substantive updates,” she said.

Once the draft is released, city staff will open a minimum 30-day comment period and perform public outreach efforts before public hearings are set with the city planning commission. The Sequim City Council will have final approval.

Boughton said council adoption may not come until the fall. She told planning commissioners, though, that the updated timeline “may be a worst-case scenario.”

The city council last approved a Comprehensive Plan update in 2015.

The state-mandated update, while not an implementation document, helps the city plan for population and employment growth through 2045 under the Growth Management Act.

Staff said that, by 2045, they’re planning for the city to grow by an additional 2,959 residents, 909 jobs and 1,850 housing units.

The housing need for 20 years is projected for an annual growth rate of 1.53 percent, which follows Sequim’s 1.5 percent annual growth rate from 2015-2025.

According to the city’s Housing and Economic Analysis report from last October by Leland Consulting Group, the city has 483 lots or units finalized since 2020 with 142 having permits issued.

Another 343 preliminary plat units have been approved, too, but they are awaiting construction permits, are for sale, or the developer has withdrawn from the project.

As of October, Lavender Meadows had permits issued for about one-fourth of its 217 manufactured homes, and Rolling Hills off South Seventh Avenue had about 35 percent of permits issued for its 215 homes. They are the city’s largest current developments.

Master-planned overlays

The delay in the Comprehensive Plan likely will lead to another extension of an emergency moratorium on master-planned overlays, large scale developments within the city.

City Attorney Kristina Nelson-Gross asked city council members for the original moratorium on July 28, 2025, to “ensure that the city regulations, comprehensive plans, and other guiding regulatory documents have reached a level of consistency that will allow the staff, members of the public and the applicant to have a clear, well-defined process.”

The decision delays any permitting within the city on the proposed 600-lot Westbay development by Seabrook Holding Company which is proposed by John Wayne Marina.

A week prior to enacting the moratorium, city staff deemed Westbay “technically incomplete” for a full technical review to continue.

Representatives with Seabrook and John Wayne Enterprises threatened legal action about the moratorium but retracted their decision.

City staff have said they will ask to continue the moratorium until the Comprehensive Plan update is approved.

City council members extended the moratorium on Jan. 26. It is set to expire on July 26.

Boughton wrote in city documents in January that council members can vote to rescind the moratorium before it is set to end if “necessary updates to the Comprehensive Plan and development regulations have been adopted.”

Plan explained

According to city documents, the updated Comprehensive Plan will provide long-range policy direction for land use, transportation, economic development, housing, capital facilities, utilities, parks and recreation and the natural environment.

It will lay out a community vision and priorities and describe where, how and, in some cases, when development should occur, city staff said.

Boughton said through their review process that they’re working to provide three key elements: an updated Comprehensive Plan policy document, future land use map and capital facility plan.

They’re also working to update the city’s zoning ordinance with full rewrites to ease implementation for the city’s administration and increase the public’s understanding, she said.

Boughton said this is her fifth full work-through on a Comprehensive Plan, and since she started with the city about a year ago, she’s tried to open communications with builders and homeowners to improve accessibility to the city’s planning department. She’s also opened a text line.

Boughton said increasing communications intersects with the Comprehensive Plan because development regulations haven’t been looked at holistically for two decades.

“It’s not to change everything but to modernize and to provide ease of consistency and clarity for the user,” she said.

Some of the proposed updates follow newer directives from lawmakers to provide more housing options, such as allowing more accessible dwelling units, with two now allowed on a lot.

She said the main thing the Legislature has done for cities like Sequim is remove barriers to increase housing stock and mandate that different housing types are available for different income brackets, such as apartments, townhomes and duplexes.

Work on the city’s Comprehensive Plan update started in summer 2024 with initial public outreach, and the Planning Commission has been reviewing the plan chapter by chapter since last spring.

Eileen Cummings, chair of the planning commission, wrote that the update was developed by the city’s planning department, all the city departments, public comments and participation, developers, consultants and the planning commission.

“It’s been a long process, but it has made all the participants think about what they want the future of Sequim to be in 20 years,” she said.

“There will be time in the next 20 years to make amendments, changes, additions after what gets approved this year in this plan is tested by our community and city staff.”

By law, amendments to the Comprehensive Plan can be considered by the city council once a year all at the same time.

Julianne Coonts, vice chair for the planning commission, wrote that they “tried really hard to loosen up the language in the code to be less restrictive in order to allow for better and more diverse growth.”

She said the biggest areas of proposed change were with housing, land use and zoning.

“We wanted to make the changes we could to underutilized land use and zoning sections in order to allow for more sustainable growth,” she said.

Coonts said they look forward to the opportunity to consider the public’s opinions and experiences with the plan.

For more information about the Comprehensive Plan, visit sequimwa.gov/1301/2025-Comprehensive-Plan-Update.

________

Matthew Nash is a reporter with the Olympic Peninsula News Group, which is composed of Sound Publishing newspapers Peninsula Daily News, Sequim Gazette and Forks Forum. He can be reached by email at matthew.nash@sequimgazette.com. Nash has family employed by and enrolled in Sequim School District.