The city of Bonney Lake and Pierce County are headed to court to settle their dispute over the city’s attempts to annex more than 1,800 acres south of city limits.
The Bonney Lake city council on Tuesday made it official with a 7-0 vote to formally appeal the Pierce County Boundary Review Board’s decision to deny the city’s application for annexation.
City Administrator Don Morrison said there are two main grounds for the appeal. First, he said the county did not meet the proper timeline for invoking jurisdiction over the area, which led to the Boundary Review Board Hearing.
According to Morrison, the 45-day clock on the county’s ability to invoke jurisdiction begins when a city submits a completed application for annexation. However, Morrison said after the completed application was submitted, the county “held (Bonney Lake) hostage” over taking over several streets along the boundaries that were originally left to the county and started the clock after that process.
“We feel they exceeded their authority in doing that,” he said. “Because everything was accurate and complete, we think the clock should have run sooner.”
More importantly, Morrison said they are also appealing on the merits of the case.
Morrison called the Boundary Review Board’s decision “arbitrary and capricious,” adding the city’s belief is that any urban growth area that is contiguous to a city can be annexed, whether it is city-affiliated UGA or part of the Comprehensive Urban Growth Area (CUGA), a designation that only exists in Pierce County.
During the hearing, the county argued that Bonney Lake had not followed proper procedures to affiliate CUGA land with their city, something with which the board agreed.
Bonney Lake Deputy Mayor Dan Swatman said the main issue is whether or not the county can make a special designation of land that is not part of the urban growth area.
Councilmember Mark Hamilton agreed.
“It’s our fundamental belief it is the role of the county to assign urban growth area,” he said. “It is the role of the cities to begin to plan out the areas for eventual annexation.”
Hamilton said the CUGA designation allows the county to “cherry pick” parcels it wants, forcing cities to take others, something the city believes is a wrong interpretation of the Growth Management Act.
Swatman also said the other side of the issue is the money expected to come from Plateau 465, an undeveloped master plan community expected to generate more than $12 million in traffic impacrt fees and nearly $9 million in park impact fees.
Swatman said the county wants to take that money off the plateau for use in South Hill and other county lands.
All involved said the city expected to lose at the county Boundary Review Board, making an appeal necessary. They also said the city would continue to appeal to higher courts, all the way to the state supreme court in order to get a ruling on the CUGA designation.
Morrison said the appeals should not cost the city too much money because they are closed hearings, meaning only the information form the previous record is admissible.
