Chelan begins long look at future access as council dockets private proposal

CHELAN — The Chelan City Council voted Jan. 27 to add a privately submitted transportation proposal to the city’s 2026 comprehensive plan docket, beginning what Community Development Director John Ajax repeatedly described as a review process — not an approval of the proposal itself.

“We did receive one private proposal for an amendment to our comprehensive plan, and that has to do with our transportation element,” Ajax told council. He said the request would be folded into the city’s ongoing “major update” of the comprehensive plan, with analysis led by the city’s outside transportation consultant, Transpo Group.

Ajax emphasized that a “yes” vote was simply the council agreeing to take the request in for evaluation.

“You’re not being asked to evaluate or approve that specific item on its merits tonight, so you’re not approving anything,” Ajax said. “If you vote yes for this tonight, all that does is put it into our review.”

He compared it to an application being accepted for processing rather than granted.

“It’s analogous to if someone were to apply for a building permit, that doesn’t mean you’re automatically approving that building permit because they submit it,” Ajax said. “It just means that you’ve taken it in and you would review it and see if it meets the criteria, and then ultimately you would approve or deny that.”

Chelan resident Lynette Grandy, who signed up to speak on the comprehensive plan docket item, urged council to see the request as a consequential moment, even as she said she was not opposing the city studying it.

“I’m not opposing this moving through for the city to study and decide on,” Grandy said. “But to me, it’s a historic thing that’s happening. It’s for a property group, a big group like them, formally and publicly asking for an amendment to the comprehensive plan.”

Grandy told council the request could be distilled into a small addition to the transportation element, while still carrying significant implications.

“I know they’ve submitted the pages and pages and pages of information, but you get right down to the nitty-gritty of what they want is a comp plan amendment,” she said. “I carry my comp plan around. It’s getting pretty shabby. But the nitty-gritty is that they want approximately 50 words added to the comp plan.”

She said the requested language involves a “South Chelan Access Corridor Designation and Purpose,” and she highlighted concurrency language that would tie transportation improvements to development timelines.

“Maintain level of service standards, improvements concurrent with development or financially committed within six years,” Grandy said. “So concurrent with development, that means that improvements or strategies are in place at the time of development or that a financial commitment is in place or strategies within six years. So that’s a big commitment.”

Grandy also referenced a concept she said was included in the request — a “modern roundabout” and street realignments — and raised questions about what that could mean in practice, including right-of-way impacts and coordination with the Washington State Department of Transportation.

Councilmembers pressed Ajax on what, exactly, was being decided Jan. 27 — and what was not.

Councilmember Tim Hollingsworth said the city’s comprehensive plan update is already underway regardless, and that docketing a proposal does not mean adopting it.

Ajax confirmed that the city’s required comprehensive plan update is in progress and described the broader purpose of the transportation element, which is ensuring the city’s land-use designations can be served by a credible transportation plan.

“The city needs to have a transportation element that shows that those levels of density and development can occur without a major problem,” Ajax said. He added that without guidance in the plan, transportation questions can be left to case-by-case permitting and environmental review. “Outside of this would be through a land use application and a SEPA review process, which doesn’t give much direction to city staff,” he said.

Hollingsworth followed up by stressing that the council was not approving any specific project.

“But just to be very clear that we are not approving that plan as is,” he said. “This is just for discussion and to help staff focus on that area.”

Ajax agreed, describing the comprehensive plan as a framework document rather than a final engineering blueprint.

“Comp plans are general in nature,” Ajax said. “We’re not going to end up with a detailed specific plan that comes out of the comprehensive plan. It’s not going to get down to the level of detail that this is what the development looks like because we don’t know.”

Councilmember Agustin Benegas asked whether docketing language “doesn’t lock us into a roundabout,” describing the plan as more of a guide. Ajax said the city is not committing to a particular project design at this stage, and that key details — including whether an item ends up on the city’s six-year transportation improvement plan — would depend on future analysis, deficiencies, applications and funding.

“There is no pending land-use application,” Ajax said. “We don’t have a development right now. We have no funding available, or it doesn’t meet the criteria to end up on that six-year transportation plan at this point.”

Hollingsworth returned to the question of how the proposal would be used by the city’s consultants.

“I think this is a proposal. We’re putting it on the docket, and the Transpo Group, which are transportation engineer professionals, they’ll be reviewing it, and they’ll use it as a basis to come up with language that may or may not hit all the bullet points,” he said.

“Absolutely. That is correct,” Ajax replied.

Hollingsworth said he saw value in creating a placeholder as the city evaluates how future growth could be served.

“It will be a big impact,” he said. “It’s actually designed to accommodate the bigger impact of future development up on Hill. And how we best do that is probably still up in the air. But at least it gives us a placeholder for how we are going to develop that without committing to any definite specifics.”

The motion to approve the 2026 comprehensive plan docket passed unanimously.

Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media