The South Bend City Council met for their regular bi-monthly council meeting, on Monday, August 8, Mayor Julie Struck called the meeting to order and lead with the pledge of allegiance.
After the council approved the consent agenda for the current meeting they approved the minutes of the previous meeting before introducing John Kliem from Creative Community Solutions, who worked on the Shoreline Management Plan, along with the Planning Commission.
Kliem is a consultant and owner of Creative Community Solutions and primarily does community development and rule planning for small cities in Grays Harbor, Lewis and Pacific Counties. Kliem has been at that job for twenty-four years, and has been working with the city of South Bend for about fifteen years. Kliem explained to the council that about two years of work has been put into this Shoreline Management Plan, and really what has to happen next is that it needs to be approved by the council.
South Bend has been governed by the Shoreline Management Act since 1971, and the act focused on doing three things in particular: To help promote the location of what we called "preferred uses" along the shoreline, to make sure that they protected shoreline natural resources, and also to promote public access.
"All of these things have been in the law since 1971 and South Bend passed their first Shoreline Master Program around '74 or '75," Kliem explained, "This law really only really applies to the Willapa River, Skidmoore Slew and Potter's Slew. Any waters that have a flow of twenty cubic feet per second of mean annual flow or greater, falls under this act."
The Planning Commission has used the citizen's input as a key component to the plan. They conducted presentations, public surveys and a "visioning workshop" that "Did a really good job of laying out a future vision of how they wanted to see future development along the shoreline and I've used that to develop a vast majority of the plan," said Kliem.
When Kliem was finished presenting, Council Member Pat Neve had a question:
"A key waterfront goal of the city is to obtain property between Robert Bush Drive and the South Shoreline, where are we going to get the money for this? This isn't so much a plan as it is a wish list. We would have to hire one or two more people to do all of the maintenance for the wishes in this list. A plan to me, has a list of things to do to get to the goal, I see a want but no plan to get there.
Neve then mentioned that a lot of the language has the word "should" where it should be a more affirmative word like "will," Kliem explained: "These are things that the planning commission heard from the community. The way that the Shoreline Master Program is structured, there are policies and regulations.
The policies are statements of intent that are important to keep in mind, but are not regulatory. They are things that the city is going to attempt to achieve, but it gives some latitude to recognize the fact that these things may or may not be possible. So those are "mays" and "should," and oddly enough the State defines these terms. Regulations are always "wills" and "shall," so when you start seeing "should," those are things that we try and can aim for," said Kliem. After Kliem's presentation, the council discussed what they should do with the Shoreline Management Plan, and decided to do more research on it before coming to a decision of any kind. The council voted to table the decision on the Shoreline Management Plan.
Police Chief Dave Eastham reported on two items, one was a dog that was cited for attacking a cat, that was unlicensed. He warned to remember to get your dog licensed. "We're starting to get people walking late at night and some of these people are thieves. Please lock your cars. Our officers happened to come up on a guy and it happened to be the latest car prowler. We haven't had a car prowl since."
It was time in the meeting for the Mayor's Report, where Mayor Struck reported that South Bend has been approved to convert their street lights to LED's, "Doug Miller contacted me through the PUD and they've got a grant to do that. So they'll be converted sometime in the near future," said Struck.
After the Mayor's Report the meeting was adjourned. The next South Bend City Council meeting will be held on Monday, August 22.