Sometimes, growing pains last for months.
When Chehalis City Manager Jill Anderson entered Chehalis City Hall’s council chambers for last week’s council meeting, she greeted area developer Aaron Fuller and builder Dan Hawes, thanking them for coming as she was preparing to address comments Fuller made during a March council meeting on a development backlog the city is enduring.
By the end of last year, the city had a backlog of upwards of 10 projects that were in the civil review process of development, according to Anderson. In March, Fuller told the council he had had a project in limbo with the city for six months.
There are three parts of the development process: land use, civil and building. The civil part of the development process ensures that the groundwork creating a good foundation for the development will be carried out to regulations.
In her manager’s update to the council, Anderson said the city had worked through six of the backlogged projects, with two more to be eminently buttoned up and the rest awaiting response from the applicants.
Yet more projects are piling up in the civil part of the process from this year’s submissions, totaling at least eight so far.
At the end of last year, the city faced a medical absence of its engineer, who later left the position altogether, which accounted for some of the backlog, Anderson said.
To catch the city up, Longview engineering firm Gibbs and Olson was contracted by the city to work through the backlog and take lead on several ongoing projects. The firm officially became the city’s contract engineer in January, according to Anderson.
“We do take this (backlog) seriously,” Anderson told the council. “We’re trying to put as many resources as possible into it. The ability to increase the actual staff does not exist. The council has approved various contracts to be able to meet this need. We may need to revisit this as we go forward, to add additional staff.”
She said several other staffing challenges have also contributed to the backlog.
Yet the hang-ups keep dangling over developers, with one project stuck in the civil review process receiving a spotlight during the public comment period of last week’s meeting.
Elizabeth and Floyd Smith addressed the council, saying that they have had an application in the civil review part of the process for over a month with no response.
The Smiths said they felt the length of time it has taken the review team at Gibbs and Olson to get back to the Smiths with comments they need to address for their upcoming storage units on Hamilton Road has shown incompetence on the firm’s part, especially since Gibbs and Olson has already made over $400,000 off of the city this year alone, Elizabeth Smith said.
“It’s sitting on someone's desk in Longview,” she said. “We have two building lots ready to be built on in Chehalis. We’re waiting. I don’t know what to do at this point. I’m tired of it sitting on someone’s desk in Longview. I’m tired of it.”
So in addition to the backlog of projects in the civil part of the process from last year, the Smiths claimed their development was also stuck in the same mire.
Floyd Smith said the delay will cost the Smiths “half a million dollars — maybe more if we get beyond building season.”
Elizabeth Smith put it this way: “I have to get it through civil to go to building and well, guess what? I’m going to bypass building season at that point because you guys aren’t going to be able to get it through for me. That’s a problem. That’s a big problem. And I’m not the only one that’s got this problem.”
In addition to that, the Smiths said the city is creating unnecessary obstacles to development, specifically with the requirement that they hire a landscape architect for the project.
“Hopefully you guys want to grow and get bigger, and so whenever you put obstacles in place for all these things, it slows everything down, (making) Chehalis a lesser city, not a greater Chehalis,” Floyd Smith said. “And it costs the city money. What’s the cost of having 300 to 500 people drop stuff off at a storage center? They have to get gas. They have to eat (and) go to the restaurants. They may or may not stay in hotels. That’s money for the city — not to mention the income for the storage units that indirectly comes back to the city.”
When the Smiths completed their comments, Mayor Tony Ketchum thanked them for their opinions.
“We need to somehow get through this process and work with them and Gibbs and Olson and try to resolve the issues that seem to be popping up almost every meeting,” Ketchum said, adding later: “It also sounds (like) maybe we need to have another open discussion with Gibbs and Olson to work out issues maybe we have between us and them.”
Anderson told the Smiths that Gibbs and Olson would get their civil comments back to them for review by the end of last week.
When contacted by The Chronicle on Thursday to see if the Smiths had indeed gotten the civil comments back from Gibbs and Olson, the Smiths said they had received the comments.
“She did good,” Elizabeth Smith told The Chronicle of Anderson’s follow-through. “It’s not final civil, but we got something back the next day.”
By this, she meant that Gibbs and Olson identified areas in the civil plans for the storage unit that needed to be addressed by her and Floyd before the project could be greenlighted and move into the building phase of development.
Yet the Smiths said the comments received from Gibbs and Olson appear to be referencing an exchange of comments that had already taken place between the two parties, a dialogue that the Smiths say never happened.
“They tried to make it look like they had already gotten the plans back to us by referring to previous comments they made that don’t exist,” Floyd Smith told The Chronicle.
“It’s clearly a misrepresentation,” he said, adding that it appeared Gibbs and Olson made the inaccurate comments to cover up their own mistake.
