SEQUIM — The City Council neglected a critical responsibility while updating its Comprehensive Plan, according to a scathing eight-page letter from Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal Chairman Ron Allen to the city.
The plan’s latest revision, released to the public May 19, should have been shown to the tribe sooner, Allen wrote.
Its chapters on open space, wildlife, shorelines and historical and cultural resources greatly concern the neighboring tribal government, he added, yet after “both verbal and written requests,” no one at City Hall sent him a copy of the plan.
Councilman Ron Farquhar and Mayor Walt Schubert were the only council members who responded Thursday to requests for comment on Allen’s letter.
“He can go online like any citizen,” said Farquhar.
“We do like to hear from them, but we don’t need them telling us what to do. . . . We have to run our own city.
“They’re going to build a hotel, a store and a gas station, and I don’t remember us getting anything from them,” Farquhar said, referring to the Jamestown tribe’s plans to build a seven-story resort hotel and a “country store” with six gas pumps near 7 Cedars Casino in Blyn, about 5 miles from Sequim.
“We actually had to go get [the plan] off the Internet,” Scott Chitwood, the tribe’s natural resources director, said Thursday.
The city held numerous public meetings on the plan, he acknowledged, and it sent copies of it to state agencies for review.
But Sequim should also have reached out and collaborated with, its eastern neighbor, Chitwood said, adding that many plan elements scarcely recognize the tribe’s existence.
“Tribal people have inhabited the Sequim-Dungeness area for 12,000 years,” the letter notes.
Yet the plan’s Historical and Cultural Resources Element “places considerable focus on recent history of agriculture and gives only brief mention of ‘prehistoric Native American sites’ with the caution to ‘consider’ that they might be uncovered during development.
“The tribe would be pleased to work with city staff to draft a short narrative statement that is more descriptive of our history and that identifies the process for identification and consultation regarding archeological resources.”
