🅿️ Parking Reform Comes to Stevenson - Citywide Round-up June '26

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🏛 June 2026 Stevenson Municipal Round-Up

Agencies Covered: Stevenson City Council (June 18) · Stevenson Board of Adjustment (June 10)

The Bottom Line: The long-running sewer rewrite reached its second reading with real concessions to septic owners, but the council sent it back for one more round of edits rather than adopt it. Meanwhile the city is moving to scrap downtown parking minimums, just as its Board of Adjustment granted a hotel relief from those very rules, and the hunt for a permanent city administrator fell through at the last minute.

The Vibe: Collegial and detail-deep, but stretched thin. A small staff (two of its four staff members were out on the 18th, along with an excused councilmember) is juggling a thorny ordinance, a stalled hire, and the aftershocks of handing its planning duties to the county.

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🔎 What Changed

• The revised sewer ordinance now plainly exempts existing, working septic systems from mandatory connection, drops the old 300-foot trigger, and ends the sale-or-transfer trigger.
• The council hired an outside CPA firm for financial oversight (Teresa D. Johnson CPA, Inc., up to $15,000 through year-end) ahead of a state audit.
• The Board of Adjustment granted the Artbliss Hotel a parking variance, cutting its required on-site spaces from six to three.

⚠ What Escalated

• Residents pushed back hard on one surviving clause, SMC 13.08.070(C), warning it could force a sewer hookup for ordinary septic repairs, not just true failures.
• The city administrator search fell through: a chosen finalist accepted terms, then withdrew for personal reasons.
• A second variance, an ADU placement case, was continued after the applicant didn't show, exposing that the city's own ADU rule conflicts with state law.

🧭 What's Next

• The sewer ordinance is expected to return to the council on July 16 for possible adoption before the August 31 penalty moratorium expires, after a July 9 work session.
• That retreat will also set 2026 priorities, including downtown parking reform.
• The Board of Adjustment reconvenes in mid-July on the continued ADU variance.

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Stevenson City Council

🚰 The Sewer Ordinance: Second Reading, Still No Vote

This is the central, recurring fight in Stevenson, and June moved it closer to the finish without crossing it. The "second reading" of the rewritten sewer ordinance (Stevenson Municipal Code Chapter 13.08) came with substantial concessions to property owners, but the council chose to send it back for more edits rather than adopt it.

What the revised draft now does:

• Protects working septic systems. Any lot owner with an existing, functioning, approved On-Site Septic System (OSS) is no longer required to connect just because sewer is available. City Attorney Robert Muth said this lifts the mandate from the roughly two dozen lot owners directly affected by recent sewer extensions.
• Redefines "available." The old 300-foot measurement is gone, replaced by whether a sewer main "abuts the property."
• Drops the sale trigger. Selling or transferring a home no longer forces a connection.
• Sets the incentive clock, with one gap still open. The draft waives the System Development Charge (SDC) for owners who connect within one year of the ordinance taking effect. The council's intent is that a fresh 365 days start each time the city extends a line to newly affected lots, but the draft in the packet does not say that yet: it gives a later-served owner only "the remaining time left," and it runs the waiver from passage for 365 days, after which it "lapses." The gap was caught on the record, and Attorney Muth agreed to rewrite the subsection so the clock restarts with each extension. Public Works wants the clock to start when the connection stub is finished, not when construction begins.
• Settles inspections at five years. The city may ask an owner to document their septic system roughly every five years. It will not perform warrantless inspections, and state code sets a three-year floor the city cannot go below.
• Clarifies new development. Vacant lots need not connect unless they are developed into a single- or two-family dwelling. Subdivisions of five or more lots must extend sewer, as several recent projects were required to do.

Where it stuck: the language in subsection 13.08.070(C) that governs septic "failure." As drafted, the clause applies where a septic system "has failed, is failing, or requires repair, replacement, alteration, expansion, increased capacity, resizing, relocation, extension, or other work necessary to lawfully serve the existing or proposed use of the lot." Lead resident voice Brian McNamara, a property owner who has sat through so many rounds of this ordinance that the city attorney joked this was "probably the 40th reading of this" ("I've been to many of them," McNamara agreed), argued that list sweeps too broadly, that it "covers everything from might fail to repairs to extension" and could trip the mandatory-connection wire for routine work. "When you think of a trigger, you're thinking of tens of thousands of dollars to the homeowner," McNamara told the council. Former councilmember Pat Rice, writing in, made the same point: the clause "appears to apply not only to failed systems, but also to systems that may be functioning properly." The council agreed to narrow the trigger so that only a public-health "red tag" (a documented failure that can't be repaired) forces a connection, with Muth to redraft the section.

McNamara also pressed, in a written comment, for something the draft doesn't yet offer: a permanent SDC waiver for legacy septic properties, rather than a one-year window. His warning is that a closing window does the opposite of its intent, giving owners a reason to delay connecting as long as possible. He framed the principle this way: future sewer extensions "should focus on new developments rather than capturing existing residents to pay down sewer treatment plant debt."

A process complaint ran underneath the substance. The lengthy red-lined draft landed in the public packet the night before the meeting. "There's a lot of residents and owners who would rather have a little more time to go over it," McNamara said, and Mary Repar and Pat Rice echoed it. The mayor kept the item moving but agreed the edits will come back before any vote.

Stevenson built an upgraded wastewater treatment plant (a roughly $15 million project, by the city's earlier accounting) and took on debt to do it, and the original ordinance leaned on nearby septic owners to help carry that load by connecting. The 2026 rewrite is the council walking that back under sustained resident pressure, the same pressure that produced February's six-month penalty moratorium. The remaining fights are narrow but consequential: whether a homeowner fixing a septic line triggers a five-figure hookup, and whether the incentive to connect ever expires. With the moratorium lapsing August 31 and the next regular meeting on July 16, expect adoption in July.

🏛 Land Use: Who Decides Permits, and a Rule That Conflicts With the State

Two land-use items advanced as discussions, both pointing at the same theme: Stevenson's codes are out of step, and the council is deciding who fixes them.

• Conditional Use Permit (CUP) authority may shift from the Planning Commission to the City Council. Under a draft ordinance, the Planning Commission would still hold the public hearing and build the record, but it would make a recommendation rather than the final call, with the council deciding and any appeal going straight to Superior Court. That removes the contracted "hearings officer" the city has used about three times in five years. The mayor and attorney framed it as putting the decision with elected officials. Notably, this reverses the direction a resident urged just last month, when Mary Repar asked the council to keep that authority with the Planning Commission. The catalyst is the long-simmering River Christian Church matter (see Public Comment, below).
• The city's ADU rule is stricter than the state's model. Stevenson caps a detached accessory dwelling unit (ADU) at 40 feet from the main house (SMC 17.40.040), and the council was told that Washington's 2023 ADU law no longer allows such limits and that the county is rewriting its own ordinance now. The conflict surfaced through a Board of Adjustment case (below). The statute is narrower than the meeting's shorthand: the 2023 law (RCW 36.70A.680-.681) lists what cities may not require of ADUs, says nothing about how far a detached unit may sit from the main house, and by its own terms applies only inside urban growth areas in counties fully planning under the Growth Management Act. Skamania County is a partial-planning county, a limit raised on the record, and when a member asked whether this was a Growth Management Act requirement, the answer was no. The direction is real all the same: the city attorney warned that a denial resting on the 40-foot rule alone could invite an appeal, and the council directed Attorney Muth and the county planner to rewrite the ADU code toward the state model, likely routing it through the Planning Commission. The stalled short-term-rental recommendations are waiting in the same line.

🅿️ Downtown Parking: The City Moves to Drop Its Minimums

The council took up a detailed staff memo to eliminate minimum off-street parking requirements in the downtown C1 commercial district, paired with a low-cost wayfinding-sign effort to point visitors toward parking that already exists. The memo argues this isn't a new direction but the implementation of work the city already did: Ordinance 2021-1172, the Downtown Plan, the Comprehensive Plan, the Wayfinding Master Plan, and the 2021/2023 Downtown Parking Report all point the same way. The mechanical changes would touch SMC 17.25.130(B), 17.42.030, and Table 17.42.090-1.

The discussion circled a stubborn fact from the city's own parking study: people won't walk far. One speaker returned to the point twice, citing the study's finding that people don't want to walk more than 65 feet from where they park, and vouching for the work: "Ben's presentation on the availability of parking in our community is still a very good study. There is parking." (That is the downtown parking study presented by Ben Shumaker, the city's former community development director; the meeting recording does not label who spoke.) Another voice pushed back on the premise, saying "I don't buy the 65 feet thing all that much" and pointing to Leavenworth and the small towns along Oregon's Highway 101, where centralized parking works because "there's an expectation that you're going to walk. Why isn't that expectation here?" The council was directionally supportive and parked the topic for its July 9 retreat as a 2026 priority, with the Downtown Association pulled in.

This connects directly to the Board of Adjustment's work the week before. The same C1 parking minimum that the council now wants to scrap is exactly what forced the Artbliss Hotel into a variance hearing. The council fixing the rule city-wide and the board granting one-off relief are two responses to one problem.

📚 Editor's Note: Stevenson Isn't Doing Parking Reform Alone

It's worth knowing that Stevenson's proposal is a local entry in a national rethink that's been building for two decades, not a one-off idea. The intellectual starting point is UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup, whose 2005 book "The High Cost of Free Parking" argued that minimum-parking rules were never based on real demand. They were copied from town to town, and they quietly force every project to oversupply parking, which raises rents, eats developable land, and subsidizes driving whether or not anyone needs the spaces.

That critique became a movement. The advocacy group Strong Towns now runs an "End Parking Mandates" campaign, and the Parking Reform Network keeps a running map of communities that have rolled the rules back, more than 200 of them across the U.S. and Canada by their count. Their core argument is the one Stevenson's own staff memo makes: a single parking space can cost roughly $5,000 to $50,000 to build, so a mandate quietly adds tens of thousands of dollars to a project and can make reusing a small downtown building or adding homes flatly infeasible.

The list of places that have moved is not just big coastal cities. Buffalo, New York, became one of the first major American cities to drop parking minimums citywide in 2017, and Hartford, Connecticut, followed in 2018. Since 2015, more than 35 cities have partially or fully scrapped their minimums, including Spokane right here in Washington, plus Anchorage, Minneapolis, Austin, and Lexington. Two whole states relevant to the Gorge have gone further: California's AB 2097 (2022) bars parking minimums near transit statewide, and Oregon, just across the river, ended mandatory parking minimums across its largest metro areas that same year.

The piece most relevant to a small city like Stevenson is the rural and small-town case. Strong Towns has argued, in pieces like "Small Towns Are the Real Champions of Parking Reform," that minimums hit hardest precisely where lots are small, historic, and oddly shaped, which describes most of a downtown like Stevenson's. And in places where nearly everyone drives, on-street and shared parking usually absorbs the demand on its own. The reform unlocks reinvestment without costing the town anything to build. Anchorage, which has eliminated its parking minimums and eased rules for converting old buildings, saw the former Barratt Inn reopen as 96 units of low-income housing, the kind of adaptive reuse that fixed parking ratios often make impossible.

A fair caveat: removing a mandate does not ban parking. Developers still build the parking their tenants and customers actually want, and the cities that saw the biggest housing gains usually paired parking reform with other zoning changes, so Stevenson's effect on its own will be real but modest. Still, the through-line is clear. When Stevenson's staff called this "a practical quick win" grounded in the city's own prior studies, they were describing a tool that towns far smaller than Seattle have already used to get out of their own way.

💵 Money and Management

• CPA financial oversight, approved. The council adopted a resolution letting the mayor sign a personal services agreement with Teresa D. Johnson CPA, Inc. for advisory and oversight work, not to exceed $15,000 through December 31, 2026. It's the firm White Salmon uses. With heavy staff turnover and a state audit coming, the mayor called it money well spent "just to make sure we're doing things right."
• The administrator search fell through at the last minute. After interviews and a selection roughly two and a half weeks earlier, with terms and salary negotiated, the chosen finalist withdrew. "At the last minute, the applicant pulled, and for personal reasons outside the control of her or the city," the mayor reported. She has re-engaged the recruiter and is looking at other Northwest searches. The previously expected mid-to-late July start is off.
• Finances, as reported. Standing in for the absent finance director, the mayor said fund balances were tracking well (general fund near 1.8 million, fire 2.2 to 2.3 million, sewer 1.7 million, tourism 1.6 million), with about 81% of revenue received year to date against roughly 19% of expenditures. (These figures came from the mayor reading the finance memo aloud and are approximate.)
• Consent agenda. Approved: the May 21 minutes, a special-occasion liquor license for the Veterans Support Group at the Skamania County Fair, and forgiveness of a utility balance on Account No. 25942 left by a previous tenant, read into the record as $926.17. Vouchers were also approved. The liquor notice passed with one exception: none of the four use boxes on the state form had been checked, and the council declined to approve the fourth, which would have allowed sales of beer, wine and spirits in unopened bottles for off-premises consumption. Staff were to have the applicant check the correct box, for consumption on the premises.

🚧 Public Works

Delivering Cody Rosander's report, the mayor ran through a busy summer list: Cascade Avenue paving is nearly finished after the city rejected much of the original work and a new subcontractor redid it; the Rock Creek intake is declining in what staff called "a dangerous year" but is still operating with a backup well and power; the Rock Creek Pump Station faces an early-July shutdown for epoxy work the crew will do in-house; and a McAvoy waterline cracked during a valve install, briefly affecting about half a dozen homes. A FEMA winter-storm grant of roughly $100,000, covering about 87% of the damage, awaits a council acceptance resolution. (Staff figures are approximate; the city's May minutes put the combined federal and state cost-share on the related Rock Creek pump-and-line repair at about 97%.)

🗣 Public Comment

• Traffic at the First Street viewpoint. Rick Chestnut described a near-miss when a speeding truck crossed the center line near the gas station, and Mary Repar agreed the redesigned, widened sidewalk narrowed the street dangerously. "It's a safety issue," Chestnut said.
• The LDB Beverage discharge permit. Mary Repar, who had requested a public meeting on LDB Beverage's request to modify its wastewater discharge permit, reported that the state Department of Ecology had walked her through it. The modification, she said, "adds new language to prohibit the discharge of the side-streaming waste collected in totes back into the city sewer system," which eased her main concerns about overloading the new plant. She still urged residents to understand exactly what such modifications mean.
• One Prevention Alliance. Karen Douglass of the substance-abuse prevention nonprofit, which leases office space in the City Hall basement, thanked the council for the space and said July 1 would mark her sixth year with the organization, citing 22 parenting classes, fentanyl education for 385 students, and 900 participants at National Night Out, funded through a state grant and county opioid dollars.
• River Christian Church. Greg Stafford, an adjoining property owner, renewed his objection to the church's conditional use permit (CUP2024-01), which the Planning Commission rejected in 2024. He argued the application is void and the church's new playground and fencing are a nuisance on contaminated ground. The attorney clarified that the church withdrew its CUP, so no application is pending, and that the playground did not require a separate permit.

👮 Sheriff's Report

Skamania County Undersheriff Tracy Wyckoff presented the May activity report and said the trauma debrief for first responders, following an earlier tragedy in town, "went well." She expected to name a new emergency-management coordinator within the week.

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Stevenson Board of Adjustment

🅿️ Artbliss Hotel Parking Variance (VAR-2026-001): Granted

The board granted a variance reducing the required on-site parking for the new Artbliss Hotel four-plex addition at 31 NW Second Street from six spaces to three. The facts:

• Under the C1 commercial code (SMC 17.42.090), the property owes six on-site spaces (one per hotel sleeping unit, plus the one-bedroom home and an employee ratio). It has three.
• Planner Joshua Neblock recommended approval, resting heavily on how the project got here. The building permit issued around 2023, during the handoff of planning duties to Skamania County, and the only record he could find on parking was, in his words, "a one-line note that said the parking requirement must be satisfied before certificate of occupancy could be obtained." No plan, no emails. Building an expensive structure to completion and then withholding occupancy, he argued, would conflict with the city's duty to help applicants, not just regulate them.
• Owner Thomas Sikora, who has held the parcel since 2003 and built the original adjacent hotel about five years ago, said the steep, shelf-like topography made on-site or under-building parking unworkable, and that an easement was explored but abandoned as impractical.

Public comment ran in favor. Resident Janet Campbell, in town since 2001, spoke to support it. Councilmember Dave Cox, speaking as a citizen, was blunt: "I'm frustrated that the city has dropped the ball, quite frankly. I don't think Tom should be penalized" for a parking issue the city failed to nail down at permitting.

One board member resisted, worried about precedent and fairness, since downtown street parking is open to everyone and the city designates no business spaces. The attorney and staff drew the key line carefully: the variance reduces the number of on-site spaces required, it does not hand the hotel reserved spots on the state highway. "A variance is always a one-off," the attorney said. With that clarification on the record, the motion carried.

🏡 Schade ADU Variance (VAR-2026-002): Continued

The second case, a request by applicant Ryan Cook for landowner Bob Schade at 329 NW Kanaka Creek Road, asked to place a detached accessory dwelling unit about 84 feet from the main house, well beyond the 40-foot limit in SMC 17.40.040. Staff again recommended approval, citing an existing utility-served RV pad, a backyard water resource with setback issues, and a desire to preserve a mature Oregon white oak.

The board continued the case to roughly mid-July for two reasons. First, the applicant didn't attend, and the board wanted him to make his case and provide a clearer site plan showing where the septic and water resources sit and whether a compliant backyard location is genuinely infeasible. Second, members weren't sure the request cleanly met the legal test for a variance ("I'm not inclined to give it," one said of the 40-foot rule), even as several agreed the plan was reasonable on its face.

The deeper takeaway surfaced in the discussion: the 40-foot rule itself may be obsolete. Planner Neblock noted that the state ADU statute (RCW 36.70A) contains no proximity limit, that Stevenson's code "falls on the very restrictive side," and that Skamania County has already removed its own limit; he called the city's provision easy to satisfy with a variance and worth strengthening or rewriting. A board member pushed back on the housing rationale, arguing "ADUs do not give you more affordable housing. They act as money makers for the people who put them in." That tension, individual relief now versus fixing the ordinance, is the same one the City Council picked up eight days later.

🏡 Editor's Note: What the Evidence Says About ADUs

That last comment is worth checking against the research, because both the city council and the board are now weighing whether to loosen the ADU rules. The available data complicates both halves of the claim that ADUs "act as money makers" rather than principally providing more housing inventory.

On the worry that ADUs become short-term rentals (a common fear expressed in many meetings across the counties): the studies that have looked find they are overwhelmingly long-term homes, not Airbnbs. UC Berkeley's Terner Center, in California's first statewide survey of ADU owners, found only about 8 percent are used as short-term rentals, meaning roughly nine in ten are long-term housing. A separate review of permitted ADUs across six Florida jurisdictions found just 3 percent had an active short-term-rental listing, and concluded the data "does not support the idea that permitted ADUs are being converted en masse into permanent short-term rental businesses."

On affordability: ADUs are not deed-restricted affordable housing, and it's fair to say a new unit won't necessarily rent for a few hundred dollars a month. But they do add to overall supply, and they tend to undercut other new housing on price because they sit on land the owner already holds. The same Terner survey put the median California ADU rent around $2,000 and found a large share of units within reach of households earning under 80 percent of the area median income. Many also house family or aging relatives at low or no rent. That is much of the reason Washington's own 2023 ADU law (House Bill 1337) and the state planning statute the planner cited press cities to permit them, the same state rules that have left Stevenson's 40-foot limit out of compliance.

None of this means ADUs solve a housing shortage on their own; researchers are clear they don't. But the shorthand that ADUs are just money-makers and not housing isn't what the numbers show, and it's worth getting right while both bodies consider rewriting the rule.

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🛠 Jargon Buster

• Variance: a one-time, property-specific exception from a code requirement, granted only if strict rules are met. It does not change the law for anyone else.
• Board of Adjustment: a quasi-judicial city panel that hears and decides variances. "Quasi-judicial" means it acts like a court, weighing a record against legal criteria, which is why each hearing opens with "Appearance of Fairness" disclosures.

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📍 How to Join and Learn More

• Meetings and recordings: agendas and packets are posted at the City of Stevenson meetings page (ci.stevenson.wa.us/meetings), and video is archived at vimeo.com/cityofstevenson.
• Next City Council meeting: Thursday, July 16, 2026 at 6:00 PM, where the revised sewer ordinance is expected to return for possible adoption ahead of the August 31 moratorium.
• Board of Adjustment: reconvenes in mid-July on the continued Schade ADU variance; watch for a re-noticed hearing date.
• Comment: written comments for a council packet are due by noon the day of the meeting, to City Hall or by email.