| Reacting to a state Supreme Court decision striking down one city’s open-space requirements, the Bainbridge Island City Council recently cast a unanimous vote to impose a moratorium on subdivision applications until it determines how to deal with the new ruling.
The moratorium has stopped work on all applications — including short-plats that were not deemed “complete” — in their tracks the Monday after the ruling was made. Five subdivisions and 19 short-plat applications already in process were not affected.
The open space issue came to head when the Washington Supreme Court ruled that the city of Camas could not require 30 percent of a subdivision to be set aside as open space because the requirement constituted an indirect form of taxation on development. State law prohibits taxing development except where necessary to offset the burdens imposed by that specific development. The court found that the city of Camas had not sufficiently justified its 30 percent set-aside requirement. However, Bainbridge Island officials believe they can justify a similar local ordinance, which requires a certain percentage of land in each subdivision be set aside as open space. Thedifference between Bainbridge and Camas is the percentage of open space depends on the underlying zoning. It ranges from 80 percent where the zoning requires 2.5 acres for each home to 40 percent where the zoning allows two or more homes per acre and doesn’t apply to high-density zoning areas, most of which are in the downtown Winslow core.
City Attorney Rod Kaseguma believes the court ruling allows percentage open-space requirements if they are backed by sufficient evidence and said the city will justify the open-space set-asides with expert testimony about the importance of open space to things like psychological health, wildlife and slope stability among other things.
Currently, the city imposes a maximum lot coverage of 10 percent, and the court’s ruling doesn’t change that.
Mayor Darlene Kordonowy, who served on the planning commission for seven years prior to her election as mayor and worked extensively on the island city’s Comprehensive Plan, also believes the city will prevail
Developers however disagree, several noting that it’s an issue of freedom for a land owner to be able to use his or her land and that the constitutional issue of “takings may come into play.
Bainbridge Island overly stringent land use rules have been the subject of several recent lawsuits by the Homebuilders Association of Kitsap County and the Building Industry Association of Washington. In all cases, the city has lost. | 
