A proposed nine-unit apartment building with shops on the ground floor in downtown Mukilteo, Washington, has been turned down, at least for now. City Hearing Examiner Phil Olbrechts denied the reasonable use permit for the Werner Mixed Use Project in an early October decision, according to the hearing examiner's written decision.
"The application is denied without prejudice," Olbrechts wrote. That means the applicant can come back with a new application that fills in the missing information.
The deadline to appeal the decision to Snohomish County Superior Court is Oct. 30 at 4:30 p.m., according to the city's land use notices page.
Get today’s Mukilteo report for your trade, free →
Why a reasonable use permit
The site is zoned Downtown Business, and the city lists the project as a mixed-use 9-unit apartment building with retail space. A wetland on a neighboring private property, conservatively rated Category III, likely puts part of its protected buffer on the site. A stream, Brewer's Creek, may also cross it; two consultant reports disagreed on whether it does.
When critical-area rules would block any reasonable use of a lot, a Mukilteo owner can ask for a reasonable use permit. That gets a public hearing before the hearing examiner, which was held in late September.
What was missing
Olbrechts found the record didn't show where the buffers fall or how much the building would cut into them. The applicant's own report said the wetland buffer could be as much as 150 feet if the use is rated high intensity, which could cover the whole site, but it didn't map where that buffer would sit. No mitigation plan or no-net-loss analysis was offered.
The applicant testified that nothing less than 100% of the site would work. Olbrechts wrote that there was no market or numerical analysis to back that up. A hotel once planned for part of the site was dropped as not feasible, but the record didn't show how big that hotel would have been.
He also asked for something buyers rarely put in a land-use file: the purchase price. He gave an example. If the buffer covered only half the lot and the owner paid a tenth of market value because of the wetland, he wrote, reasonable use "could be limited to a coffee stand outside the wetland buffer."
Why he can reapply
Normally an applicant can't file the same project twice. Olbrechts said both the applicant and the city relied on the wrong version of the development code by mistake, a "good faith misunderstanding" of vesting rules, and Mukilteo's code doesn't let the examiner send a case back. So he denied it without prejudice instead.
A new application would need five things: the purchase price, the mapped location of all critical areas and buffers, a no-net-loss assessment with mitigation, a numerical analysis showing the project is the minimum reasonable use, and a look at other allowed uses with less impact.
He did find the project met two of the six criteria. The lot's limits weren't created by the owner, and because the site has low ecological value, building there likely poses no real threat to public health or safety.
Sources
- Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law and Final Decision, RUP-HE-26-001, City of Mukilteo Hearing Examiner
- Land Use Action Notices: Werner Mixed Use Project, City of Mukilteo
More from Morningline Research
- Mukilteo City Council Rezones Waterfront Lot 5 Near the Ferry Terminal for Shops, Restaurants and Mixed Use
- Google's Lincoln Data Center Files for a Third Building's Power and Cooling Plant
- Gasworx's First Office Building in Ybor City Files a $12.5 million Interior Build-Out
- Buda Weighs Using 3.89 Acres of Parkland to Realign Old Black Colony Road; Vote Moved to Dec. 1