The Seattle City Council passed the Environmentally Critical Areas Ordinance on April 14, 2017. The effective date of the updated Environmentally Critical Areas regulations will be May 15, 2017. The updated regulations include:
- Revised Administrative Conditional Use criteria for clustering houses near steep slopes;
- Removal of SEPA review for projects that required SEPA only because the development was in an environmentally critical area.
- Increase in buffer size for Category III wetlands; and
- Updated Tips and Director’s Rules to include information regarding the updated regulations.
A report explaining the changes and the legislation is available on our ECA Code Update website.
We provided a briefing to the PLUZ committee on November 29, 2016, the public hearing was held on December 6, 2016 and the PLUZ committee voted on the Ordinance on January 19, 2017. Check out the PowerPoint presentation and the briefing memo to find out more about what we talked about.
Additionally, the briefing, public hearing, and committee discussion and vote can be viewed on the City Council PLUZ Committee webpage.