SEQUIM — A torrent of outrage battered the city’s Comprehensive Plan on Monday night.
But the plan, like a tank through a battle, will go on.
For Monday’s City Council public hearing on the document that will guide Sequim’s growth into the next decade, nearly every seat in the Transit Center’s main meeting room was filled.
Twenty-one people went to the podium to plead with and chastise the council and city planners, who allotted them three minutes each.
Representatives of the Clallam County Planning Commission, the Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce, the Olympic Peninsula Audubon Society and Sequim First, a group advocating “healthy growth,” stepped up to complain that the council’s final revision of the plan arrived too late and with too little in terms of environmental protection.
The latest version, made available to the public last Friday, gave Sequim-area residents one business day to read it and write comments, Sequim First president Andrew Shogren noted.
Short speeches
Still, most who addressed the council read short speeches that sounded as though they were painstakingly composed.
“To our dismay, the City Council, without public comment and in less than six hours, has now removed and materially changed the tools needed to preserve Sequim’s small-town atmosphere and rural character,” Shogren said, referring to recent study sessions in which the council condensed the Comprehensive Plan.
At the start of the meeting, Mayor Walt Schubert had reminded the crowd that city leaders have afforded numerous public-comment opportunities.
Community members have been invited to scores of government meetings, talks and forums since March 2005, the mayor said.