🌿 Stevenson's Critical Areas Update Hits a Snag - Oct '26 Round-up

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🏛 Stevenson October 2026 Round-Up

Agencies Covered: Stevenson Planning Commission (Oct. 12, a joint session with the Skamania County Planning Commission) and Stevenson City Council (Oct. 15, plus a special meeting Oct. 29).

The Bottom Line: Stevenson plans to replace its own critical areas rules with the county's, which keep stream buffers far narrower than state guidance recommends. The city's Planning Commission was not ready to weigh in, and the state deadline is Dec. 31.

The Vibe: Frustrated, then apologetic. Stevenson's commissioners said they didn't know they were walking into a hearing. County staff apologized that night, and by Thursday the mayor was taking the blame too and promising a joint workshop.

🔎 What Changed

• Leana Kinley, Stevenson's city administrator from 2017 to 2024, is coming back to the job at $153,421 a year.
• Council approved a five-year jail contract with Skamania County at $88.80 a day, up from $65.
• Council told the mayor to move the leftover Courthouse Plaza grant toward a design for Walnut Park.
• The Skamania County Planning Commission recommended the joint critical areas update. Stevenson's did not vote on it.

⚠ What Escalated

• Stevenson's Planning Commission voted to ask the state for a one-year extension on the critical areas update.
• The property tax hearing slipped to November because the notice didn't go out.

🧭 What's Next

• A critical areas public hearing at the Planning Commission, then a vote at Council.
• The 2027 budget's spending side, the property tax hearing and a stack of interlocal agreements at the Nov. 19 Council meeting.
• Kinley's first budget: she starts full time Nov. 16, in the middle of budget season.

Stevenson Planning Commission

🌿 Critical areas: a workshop that was a hearing

Every Washington city and county has to keep rules for its wetlands, streams, steep slopes, flood zones and drinking-water aquifers, and update them on a schedule. For Skamania County and its cities that update is due Dec. 31, 2026. In 2024, county planner Josh Neblock later told Council, Stevenson and the county decided to do theirs together: Stevenson would repeal its own 2018 ordinance and adopt the county's by reference. The county's project page has the drafts.

On Oct. 12 both planning commissions met in Stevenson's council chambers to hear consultant Ethan Spoo of DOWL walk through the county draft. The key numbers are below. The full buffer tables are in the consultant's slides, pages 94 to 116 of the meeting packet.

• Stream buffers: the county uses 25 to 100 feet, Stevenson 50 to 100. State Fish and Wildlife guidance would make them as wide as a 200-year-old tree is tall, about 185 feet on average.
• Wetland buffers: for Categories II through IV the county uses one width where the city uses a range (a Category II wetland gets 100 feet under the county rule, 50 to 300 under the city's), so the city's widest buffers go away.
• What the state science would cost in land: across the area the ordinance covers, the state's stream buffers would raise the acreage under buffer rules from 21,069 to 65,830 acres.
• Oregon white oaks: new mitigation rules. Remove one and you could owe up to 250 saplings, and enhancement of existing oak stands at up to ten times the area affected.
• Landslide areas: a set buffer, 50 feet, the height of the slope, or what a professional recommends, never less than 10 feet. The consultant said the old rule left it to a geotechnical consultant.

The county and city chose to depart from the state's best available science on stream and wetland buffers and keep the county's widths, documented in a separate memo. State Fish and Wildlife and Ecology both commented asking for their recommended buffers, Ecology "especially for the City of Stevenson," the slide says. The consultant said one member of the public commented during the 60-day comment period.

Then the meeting came apart. The county had published notice of a joint public hearing, but Stevenson's agenda listed the item as new business, and the city side never opened a hearing. "Did we all not think it was a workshop?" one Stevenson commissioner asked, and two said they had. Commissioners said they got no notice through their city email, and the packet ran 116 pages. The county commission held its hearing and voted to recommend the update to the county commissioners. Stevenson's commission did not vote. Neblock, who also staffs Stevenson, apologized and took responsibility for the mix-up.

The questions went to substance too. One commissioner worried that the draft's "no net loss" standard gives a determined neighbor a tool to stall a lawful project for years. Another asked what the narrower buffers would cost streams and wildlife, and whether that analysis was in the packet. It wasn't. Spoo said the departure memo covers that risk, and staff said it has been on the county's website for months. A shoreline property owner on the river said a written comment they sent was never shared with commissioners and worried that a rule capping shoreline buffers at half a lot would be lost. Staff said it stays, because the city's shoreline program still points to it.

Mary Repar told the commissions Stevenson should write its own ordinance. Skamania County Public Works Director David Waymire said the joint approach began years ago, when the state Commerce department funded both governments and urged them to work together.

Before adjourning, the Stevenson commission voted to ask Commerce for a one-year extension. Members then agreed that request is the City Council's to make.

The commission also approved its August 10 minutes. It did not meet in September.

Stevenson City Council

🌿 Critical areas, take two

Three days later Neblock brought the mess to Council, saying the Planning Commission's extension request may be possible because of Stevenson's size and slow growth, and that missing the deadline without one would put the city out of compliance with the Growth Management Act, which can mean losing state grants and opening the city to lawsuits.

The statute bears Neblock out, with limits. RCW 36.70A.130 lets a city of 5,000 or fewer that grew by no more than 100 people or 17 percent, whichever is greater, over the prior ten years finish up to 24 months late. That window comes from the law itself; it isn't an extension Commerce hands out. Whether Stevenson's growth fits under that limit was not stated at the meeting. The law also ties some state public-works and water-quality grants and loans to the deadlines, though a city less than 12 months late on its critical areas rules can still qualify.

A councilmember said a full year is more than the city needs, and that a few months would do. The mayor took the blame for the briefing gap ("a lot of that's on me") and asked Neblock for a side-by-side comparison of the city's current rules and the county's. The sequence, per the discussion: a public hearing at the Planning Commission, then a vote at Council. The two bodies' November meetings are the 9th and the 19th.

The mayor also wants a joint Council and Planning Commission workshop on who does what in Stevenson planning now that the city's own planning staff are gone, a gap we wrote about in August.

🔒 A five-year jail contract

Stevenson has no jail, so it pays Skamania County to hold people arrested for misdemeanors in the city. Council approved a new contract for 2027 through 2031:

• $88.80 a day per inmate, up from $65.00, a 36.6% increase, fixed for all five years.
• A new 50/50 split when someone is held on both city and county charges.
• A $25 booking fee if the inmate doesn't pay it, and $10 a day for the county's work crew program.
• The staff memo estimates about $17,760 a year at current use, against a $13,000 jail budget in 2025.

It passed on a voice vote, with at least one abstention. One thing to fix before it's signed: Section 3 calls it "a two-year period" while giving dates that run five years.

🌳 The plaza grant heads to Walnut Park

The city has spent about $200,000 over more than a decade planning a gathering space on the county courthouse lawn, and has about $147,000 of a state Commerce grant left, according to the mayor's memo. Design stalled after a June 2024 Council vote. The grant expires in July 2027, and Commerce set an Oct. 16 deadline to request a change of scope, with state Rep. Kevin Waters' office helping.

The memo offered three paths: keep going with the plaza, move the money to a design for Walnut Park, or give it up. One councilmember said the plaza is what residents raise most: "If they bring something up, it's the plaza." But Walnut Park needs work regardless: Public Works says its old walnut tree is dying and will have to come down.

Council's direction was Walnut Park, as a first step that doesn't abandon the plaza. Ideas floated for the park included restrooms, ADA access, lighting, a mural and space for small markets. Kelly O'Malley-McKee of the Stevenson Downtown Association said the plaza route still had hurdles, including a county condition that the city adopt a no-camping ordinance and a revised agreement for the lawn, and offered the association's help raising private money for either site. Mary Repar, in public comment, called the plaza dead. Interest in the plaza also came up in the Downtown Association's survey in September.

No vote was needed. The mayor planned to file the scope change the next day and said a re-authorized grant would get a new deadline.

💵 Budget: revenues in, property tax hearing out

The property tax hearing came off the agenda. It requires a published notice, the notice didn't go out, and it moves to November. The 1% increase it would consider was put at about $5,000.

The finance director's five-year revenue comparison is in the packet. For 2027:

• General Fund revenue: $1,580,466, up from $1,532,716 budgeted for 2026.
• All funds: $7,333,588, up from $7,005,064.
• Lodging tax: $620,000, up from $487,190 budgeted for 2026. The city collected $685,657 in 2025.
• Water and sewer become two separate funds.

The finance director described revenue growth of about 4% and fund balances near $9.28 million, and flagged one line: the sewer fund has spent only about half its budget. The new treatment plant costs less to run, and that gap should feed into the rate study. The spending side is due at the Nov. 19 meeting.

👔 A familiar city administrator

Council interviewed administrator candidates Oct. 13, and the mayor, who had covered the job unpaid since February, said "I can't keep doing this job for free." Two weeks later the answer was someone Stevenson already knew.

At a two-minute special meeting on Oct. 29, Council approved an employment agreement with Leana Kinley, the city's administrator, clerk and treasurer from 2017 to 2024, who has since been finance and operations manager at the Mid-Columbia Economic Development District. Nobody spoke against it. "Welcome home," someone at the dais said.

From the mayor's memo and the agreement:

• Salary: $153,421 a year, the top step of the city's adopted administrator range. The memo notes that's $253 above the 2024 median for administrators of Washington cities of 10,000 or fewer.
• Start: Nov. 2 on a part-time transition, full time Nov. 16.
• Severance: one month's pay per year of service if she's let go without cause, counting her seven earlier years, so seven months to start, capped at twelve.
• How she was chosen: two rounds of recruiting through Prothman cost $23,329. Kinley applied after the search was under way. The mayor decided not to repeat the interview panels and community meet-and-greet for her, citing her seven-year record. The memo also discloses that the mayor has worked with Kinley before, as a councilmember and in the private sector.
• The interim math: the memo estimates the city saved about $137,000 in salary and benefits while the mayor covered the job, after $10,314 paid to consultant Rachael Fuller.

🚧 Around town

• Lasher Street: the right-of-way phase needs about six temporary and two permanent easements. The public works director hopes to bid it early in 2027.
• Rock Creek bridge: crews pulled the log jam off the footings. Repairs to riprap around a sewer line wait on a federal permit, likely until next year's low water.
• Public works shop: the 2027 request includes testing whether the city's fill site can hold a steel shop building.
• Fire: Engine 25 is due no later than September 2027, and outfitting it will run about $200,000 in the 2027 budget. The department added three new firefighters.
• Website: the city's new site is live at stevensonwa.gov. The meeting software's base package drops video chapters and live voting.
• Chamber: the Chamber is working on a two-year destination development plan, and scheduled public meetings for Nov. 2 in Underwood and Nov. 3 in Stevenson.

🚔 Sheriff's report

The September report counts 153 incidents in city limits (72 calls, 35 medical, 46 traffic, no fires) and 498 service hours. In August it was 158 incidents and 531 hours.

⚡ Cascade transmission

The Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council has asked local governments whether the underwater line would be flatly prohibited under their land use rules. The city's representative on that council said the city's letter is being drafted, and that the route maps are too coarse to tell exactly where the line would cross.

⚠️ Editor's Note: Broader Context

• Departing from the science is allowed, with homework. Under WAC 365-195-915, a city or county that sets buffers below the state's science-based recommendations should point to the record that supports it, explain why, and name the risks to the critical areas and how it will limit them. The commissioner who asked what the narrower buffers would cost streams was asking for that last piece.
• A planning commission advises; the council decides. Only the City Council can adopt the ordinance or ask for more time. What the commission can do is make sure a hearing is held and the public has a real chance to weigh in first.

🛠 Jargon Buster

• Critical areas: wetlands, fish and wildlife habitat, geologic hazards like landslides, flood zones, and areas that recharge drinking water.
• Best available science (BAS): the peer-reviewed research and state guidance a critical areas ordinance is supposed to rest on.
• Site potential tree height: how tall a native tree grows in 200 years on a given soil. State guidance uses it to size stream buffers.
• Adopt by reference: a city adopting another government's code as its own instead of writing one.
• Scope change: asking the state to spend a grant on a different project than the one it was awarded for.

📅 How to Join & Learn More

• City Council: third Thursday, 6 p.m., City Hall and on Zoom. November meeting: Nov. 19.
• Planning Commission: second Monday, 6 p.m. November meeting: Nov. 9.
• Agendas, packets and minutes: Stevenson's CivicClerk portal. Video: Oct. 12 Planning Commission, Oct. 15 Council.
• The joint critical areas drafts: Skamania County's project page.