Mailboxes line the side of the road across from the old Sandra Care Center building located at 1215 S. Tower Ave. in Centralia in 2019.
On Tuesday evening, the Centralia City Council decided to postponed a discussion on an ordinance relating to zoning, specifically special uses, and amendments to the interim zoning ordinance relating to residential care services on first reading until their second council meeting in February in order to take a closer look at local organizations that will be affected by the new code.
In April of 2019, the city council asked its the planning commission to make changes to the special uses code after a company expressed an interest in locating a residential psychiatric care facility in a residential neighborhood near Centralia Christian School. Emil Pierson, director of community development for the city of Centralia said that when going through the code they decided to look at all of the uses in all of the zones to make the code easier to read and understand. Jakob McGhie, planning commission chairman and Norm Chapman, vice-chairman helped Pierson answer some of the council’s questions.
Since then, the city has held eight public workshops and a public hearing on the code, Pierson said.
Councilor Rebecca Staebler raised some concerns with the code, saying the Housing Resource Center and their representatives feel the new code may not be inclusive.
“I know of some facilities that there’s a pretty significant change to where they’re allowed to operate and I would be concerned that some of those organizations were not included in those discussions,” Staebler said.
Staebler said that she’s not ready to sign off without having detailed conversations with some of the organizations that are impacted by the changes in the code.
After some further discussion, the council decided that the city and the planning commission need more time to look over the code and talk to organizations that, Pierson said, had not made the concerns known to the planning commission while they were working on the code. The ordinance was postponed and will be back for the first reading at the next council meeting.
“At that time (April 2019) you had a lot of concerns with essential public facilities and basically staff took it to the planning commission and as we opened up this item it kind of just had a rippling effect at that point,” Pierson said when addressing the council.
Pierson said that the planning commission had the goal of making all code easier to read and understand. He gave the example of the residential section of the code, saying it was previously 20 pages long. The planning commission condensed it to four by reorganizing the information into tables.
“When we went to the special uses code we just threw the whole thing out and started all over. Through that we came up with a new code called ‘conditional uses,’ ” said Pierson.
Pierson said that there are a number of uses that would go through the process of the conditional use but some, for example, essential public facilities must meet certain requirements before going through the conditional use process.
Pierson explained the steps of the conditional use process.
“They would have the application, they’d go through staff review, then to the hearing examiner and the hearing examiner would hold a public hearing then he would examine the conditions for approval or denial for that conditional use. It’s much more open and it’s not left to staff decision but it’s a neutral party,” Pierson said.
Some changes were made to the code to allow residential use in commercial areas, as a conditional use, which was prompted by a request from the developer who is making changes at the Fairway Center and would like to build some apartments in the shopping center to energize the area.
“The planning commission said ‘okay why not? Let’s make a way to do that,” Pierson said.
