The approval follows a yearlong effort that included the hiring of a consulting firm that was reportedly paid more than $1 million to create the draft.

The Kitsap County Comprehensive Plan was adopted in 1998, as required by the Growth Management Act. The law also requires periodic reviews, including of designated urban growth areas and their allowed densities at least every 10 years. The county had been challenged by 1000 Friends of Washington (now FutureWise) for failing to complete its UGA review by 2004, and the Central Puget Sound Growth Management Hearings Board ruled that the county was out of compliance. The original date of June 30, 2006, was extended to Dec. 31, 2006, for the county to come into compliance.

The new comp plan reduces the minimum UGA density to four units per acre from five, which would allow for larger single-family homes to be built.

A new zone was created that could accommodate a race track, and a so called Barker-Creek Corridor was created between the Silverdale and the Bremerton UGA with the goal of providing a separator between urban areas as well as environmental protections. Other changes include increasing rural forest density in order to cluster housing, and rules allowing for the transfer of development rights from rural areas to urban when developers want to add land to a UGA without creating a sub-area plan or a Limited Area of More Intense Rural Development or LAMRD.

The decrease in UGA density is one of the areas under objection by Kitsap Citizens for Responsible Planning (KCRP). Tom Donnelly, a representative from the group, said they objected to the UGA land capacity analysis that based population growth on four units per acre because the analysis should have been based on a middle number instead of the lowest or the highest. He says a UGA needs to have infrastructure such as sewers and public transit, and that’s not very feasible with only four dwelling units per acre.

However, the hearings board has previously ruled that four units per acre meets the standard for urban density in Kitsap County, so county planners don’t anticipate KCRP will prevail on that issue.

“We don’t get the growth in the UGA, so it will go into the rural area,” he said. “We’ll have more growth in that area than we want, and we’ll never have the rural/urban split that’s legislated.” The issue, he says, is compounded by the “transfer of development rights” program.

Donnelly said KCRP objected to several other plan changes, like the forest incentive program and the race track zoning. “The county did no work to figure out what (the NASCAR zoning) means to the citizens, so we couldn’t discuss it with any knowledge,” he says.

By mid-December the group had not decided whether it would file an appeal. He said money is part of the discussion, as well as looking at potential coalitions with other groups looking to challenge the plan. A decision will be made toward the end of the 60-day filing period, he said.

County planning staff could not be reached for comment.