Klickitat County has revised its Critical Areas Ordinance and issued an environmental determination of non-significance for the revised ordinance.
The revised ordinance significantly reduces protection for fish habitat and for wetlands.
The environmental determination is wrong. We need to appeal.
We need to pledges of $4,000 by THIS Friday to cover the appeal fee.
Klickitat County has issued a Determination of Non-Significance (DNS) for their revised Critical Areas Ordinance (CAO). In other words, the County has determined that the revision of the CAO will have no environmental impacts. This is patently absurd. An ordinance that lowers the level of protection of a resource will obviously have impacts. The County insists that impacts can be sufficiently evaluated on a permit by permit, case by case basis, refusing to acknowledge cumulative impacts. The revised CAO radically decreases shorelines protection, for one thing, and the impact of those changes certainly needs to be evaluated BEFORE the revised ordinance is adopted.
The County action has caught us by surprise. We expected the CAO revision after the Shoreline Management Program (SMP) update was completed. That update has been paused by an appeal from the Yakama Nation of the SEPA determination for the SMP, and the County decided to go ahead with the critical areas review.
On Monday we were notified by another organization of the County's action. We have repeatedly requested the County to include us in their distribution lists for SEPA actions, but they left us off the list for this one.
There is some possibility that the County will withdraw this DNS, under threat of appeal from FWSR and others. If they do not, we need to file an appeal. We have to stand in the way of continued environmental degradation.
The appeal deadline is this Friday, September 18. We can write an appeal, but the appeal fee, ridiculously, is $4000. The County adopted this fee for appeals a few years ago as a way of suppressing appeals, and it is quite effective.
We need to know if we can raise the money for the appeal fee. Please let us know if you can help. Email to friends@friendsofthewhitesalmon.org
Just as a side note, September 18 is also the deadline for comment on the Under Canvas project, so it's a busy week.
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