Olympia Legislative Update!!

Since the election of three new city council members and the leave of absence of mayor pro-tem Joe Hyer, the Olympia city council has drastically changed from last year. Their first order of business was to down zone the “isthmus” property to last years 35 foot height.

Olympia, like all other cities are updating their Comp Plan and their Critical areas ordinance. They are having public meetings and neighbor input events to ask the citizens what they want Olympia to look like and I see a much different city after the new plan is passed.

Some of the issues on the Olympia’s future agenda are:
1. TDR’s (transfer of development rights) (work session) ???
2. Community Development block grant approvals.(March 9th)
3. Brentridge master plan. (March 9th)
4. Ground breaking of Percival landing project (July 2010)
5. Completion of the NEW City Hall (July-August 2010)
6. The west Olympia access study (March 23rd)
7. The construction bid for fire station # 4 (Stoll Rd.) (April 13th)

Olympia successfully passed a Transportation Benefit District (TBD) and have started collecting the $20.00 license tab fee. They also voted to allow developers to defer the payment of impact fees to the time of occupancy instead of Building permit. (Both were supported and lobbied by Realtors).

The city will be looking at “Revenue enhancement” including:
1. Levy lid lift (property tax increase)
2. Utility tax increase
3. B&O tax increase
4. Sales tax increase (3/10 of one percent) if allowed by the State Legislature.

I will continue to update this information as future meetings and hearings are scheduled.

DeWayne Granacki
TCRA GAD

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 9:27 pm and is filed under goverment, news.