We all see the world through the lens of our experience. My view is colored by decades spent operating a mid-sized multinational business and eight years as a member of the Whatcom County Council. I had thought the transition from business to government would be easy, as the county was about twice the budget and number of employees as the business I had run.

I soon learned local government is far more complex and challenging to operate than a similar-sized business. As a business owner, I had no boss; a councilmember in Whatcom County has 225,000. Local government is the one “closest to the people.” It is legally a subdivision of Washington, which means that most local regulations are state mandates. Local government can legally only make things more restrictive, never less restrictive.

Everywhere across the developed world, from America to Australia to Austria, owning a house has become an unrealistic dream for most young people. During the time I was elected, I avoided developing any land in the county, feeling it was a conflict of interest to be on “both sides of the counter.” I now realize that was a major mistake. I should have developed at least one property to experience how intensely difficult our society has made it to build housing. Which is why, for the past three years since I left office, I have chosen to experience firsthand the challenge of increasing buildable land to support new housing. My current belief is that every elected official, at every level, should either try to build some housing or shadow two people who are (from start to finish, one trying to create a new buildable lot and the other trying to permit development).

Most government employees I have interacted with are dedicated and professional. When challenges arise, the cause is likely one or more of the following:

1.  the complex and sometimes conflicting rules that government employees have to navigate;

2.  the constant fear of litigation (which favors saying “no” to minimize risk, thus discouraging innovation); and

3.  some misapplication of rules due to poor training or a misunderstanding of the scope of their authority.

But the biggest barriers to more housing are a lack of interagency collaboration and a lack of understanding of the unintended consequences of new regulations upon the whole. I have seen countless state and federal mandates and read thousands of new rules and regulations, but I have never seen any include analysis of the compliance cost or the impact on affordability and availability. For example, on-demand all-electric hot water sounds energy efficient, but there never is mention that it will add $10,000 to the cost of a house, since a larger transformer is required.

Another example is the new 2025 wetlands buffer rule changes, which make it harder and much more expensive to create housing. I love wetlands; they feed my soul. Over the past 20 years, I have purchased more than 300 acres of land with the intent to enhance and protect them. My goal is to eventually gift our community with 1,000 acres protected in perpetuity. To fund this, I am using the least-sensitive portion of each parcel to create much-needed, small, clustered, energy-efficient single-family homesites while mitigating impacts by enhancing more valuable habitat at greater-than-prescribed ratios.

Ideally, growth should target urban growth areas — land outside the city limits where future development is expected — that have water and sewer already installed. The next best option is rural areas served by private water districts with surplus water rights capacity. Imagine you have 5 acres in a UGA zoned four houses per acre (20 homes in total) with one small Category III (common, lower class) forested wetland in the middle, just larger than a pickleball court. In 2024, you had to preserve a 150-foot buffer around it, taking up just over 2 acres. In 2025, the buffer is now 300 feet, or 7 acres (2 acres more than the property). Buffers don’t stop at property lines, and if the parcel has more than one wetland and/or your neighbors have wetlands, the buffers can easily cover a very large property. The law allows limited impacts to a small portion of the buffers; it requires enhancement (planting trees) on the property or nearby. Both are expensive, so the number of permitted lots will likely be much less than zoning allows. The costs get added to the homebuyer’s price, making housing even less affordable. The new 2025 buffer rules will make most of the county UGAs unbuildable.

State lawmakers acknowledge that more housing is needed, but then government departments create policies that impact affordability and availability with no awareness or analysis of the consequences. The state Growth Management Act requires planners to use “best available science,” but the current critical-areas map was built using 1981 aerial photos and a 1992 survey of (only) Category I wetlands. It fails to identify the vast majority of wetlands in the county that are Category II, Category III and Category IV, so it creates the false impression that most of the county is still buildable even though 300-foot buffers are applied. In the past 10 years, just one new buildable lot has been created for every five new houses permitted. It’s unsustainable and getting worse.

I recently joined the Whatcom County Planning Commission, as 2025 will be the year the comprehensive plan is updated. The last buildable lands report claims we have thousands of vacant buildable lots, when in truth we may be lucky to have a few hundred. We can’t plan for the future unless we know the remaining real buildable land, which requires revising the critical areas map using 2024 data.

Aren’t we all tired of seeing our grown kids forced to move elsewhere to raise our grandchildren? Our government entities must be required to identify and disclose the affordability and availability consequences created by any new regulations.