[Skamania] 🏘 Ten Units or One? - Stevenson July 2026

Stevenson's Planning Commission spent an evening on half an acre, and ended up asking a question the city cannot currently answer. Meanwhile the City Council's long sewer rewrite finally got the escape hatch septic owners have been asking for since spring. This episode covers the Stevenson Planning Commission and the Stevenson City Council for July 2026.

In This Episode

• The rezone on Southwest Attwell Road, and why one written comment put the whole argument in five words
• Why the commission refused to decide, and the two questions it sent staff away with
• A new appeal route for homeowners whose septic fails and who cannot afford to connect
• New engineering standards, and the clause that got pulled for another look
• A new Planning Commission chair
• One July council meeting we cannot report on, and why

Resources & Links

• Read the full written Dispatch at skamaniadispatch.com
• Stevenson agendas, packets and meeting video: ci.stevenson.wa.us/meetings
• Prior coverage: June 2026 and May 2026
• Next up: Planning Commission, Monday August 10. City Council, Thursday August 20.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey there, and welcome back to Open Gorge. It's time for our month-end roundup for Stevenson. Two meetings and one question that neither of them can answer. Let's start with the Planning Commission on Monday the 13th. They had one big item on the agenda: a rezone request for a half acre lot on Southwest Atwell Road. Right now, that lot is zoned suburban residential that allows one house plus an accessory unit. The owners want it changed to R3, which is multifamily. And R3 allows one unit for every 2,000 square feet of lot. On a lot this size, that would be up to 10 units. Citzone staff report puts it in a single sentence, the change would increase the maximum density of that parcel by eight dwelling units. So here's the part that surprised me. The staff report doesn't recommend either way. It says, and I'm quoting, staff do not have a recommendation currently, unquote. It tells the commissioners to weigh the change to the neighborhood themselves. That's unusual and it left the decision genuinely open. The evening actually opened with something else as well. Mary Repar used the public comment to talk about county business, a proposed quarry at the west end of Skamania County, with a comment deadline that has since passed. She said it would put 500 truck trips a day onto Highway 14. Then to the rezone, five neighbors testified, three asked the commission to say no. Two said they weren't against more housing in principle, they just wanted a smaller step or maybe more information first. The objections were specific and they were about the land. Cars already park in the road way on that street, and the setbacks would shrink. There's drainage at the lower corner that isn't on any map, there's a riparian zone, and the lot is pretty steep. One neighbor described a drop-off of 20 feet or more and asked what happens to the houses below if you take out trees and a root system holding the slope together. There was one written comment in the packet too from Bernie Bacon on Southwest Monda Road, and he had the line of the night, quote, zoning is permanent, ownership is not, unquote. And I think that's the whole tension right there. The owners say that they want to retire on the property and build five to seven units, not ten. And that may well be exactly what they do, but the rezone doesn't bind what gets built, it changes what's allowed permanently. For them and whoever owns the land after them. And in an area with a distinct housing crunch, these can be really important decisions that I'm really grateful that we get to make together. It's increasingly a common model that a lot of folks, once they find that they're ready for retirement, would like to actually open up their land to be able to make enough money that they get to stay in the place they call home, but also welcome their space to other new families. And I think working through these kinds of plans is a really important way that we get to do that together because some of the benefits are really long-term, and so are the challenges. So the owner's architect joined by phone partway through the hearing. He described the project as middle housing aimed at seasonal and midterm workers, and pointed out that there's a transit stop about a six-minute walk away. And then the commission did something worth noticing. They didn't decide. They decided to continue the hearing and sent the staff away with two questions. First, how much vacant buildable R3 land does Stevenson already have? Because there's an empty R3 parcel across the street from this one. And second, the R3 north of this lot is an ordinary R3. It carries a special overlay tied to the rock cove with its stone design, landscaping, and parking rules. What would happen if you apply that overlay here? So nobody in the room can answer either question today. Two people actually tried looking up the buildable land number with an AI chatbot during the meeting and got answers that didn't quite match each other. So that first question is the real story this month. A city that can't say how much room its existing zoning already holds and can't easily judge whether it needs that kind of zoning in this area. So the commission took up the chair's seat, which has been open since March. It should have been filled in June, but that meeting was canceled for lack of a quorum. One caution from us there, the city's recording has automatic captions and it doesn't always label who's speaking. We try our best to fill it in, but it gives the new chair's first name only. So we're waiting on the written minutes before we print that result. Okay, so moving over to City Council. Thursday the 16th. The big one, if you've been following for a couple weeks now, is that sewer ordinance. If you're on septic system in Stevenson, this is the month it finally got the piece people have been asking for since spring. So here's the situation that it fixes. Your septic system fails. You have to replace it. But the ordinance says that because City Sewer is available to your property, you're gonna have to connect it instead. And connecting can cost more than the repair. The new draft adds a section that lets you appeal that and it tells the council exactly what it has to weigh, whether the cost is genuinely prohibitive, comparing what the repair would cost against what connecting would cost, plus public health and environmental effects, how the sewer system itself is doing financially. So the example given in the room was blunt. It's going to cost me $10,000 to make this repair. It's going to cost me $15,000 to connect. So, two other changes worth knowing. The incentive for connecting early now reaches people whose properties get sewer serviced later on, not just the ones affected today. And the window to file an appeal is going to go from 30 days to 90 days. Four residents wrote in ahead of the meeting saying the published draft hadn't done what the council asked for back in June. Their letters were aimed at a version that got replaced the afternoon in the meeting. A clean copy is supposed to go up on the city website before August. There was no vote, it comes back next month. Also from the council, they advanced new engineering standards to a second reading on August 20th. That's a document of some 200 pages covering streets, storm drainage, water, and sewer construction. One class got pulled for another look about whether private developers would have to pay state prevailing wages on their own projects. On the money side, the month's voucher came to about $364,000. The finance report was strong enough that the council had no questions at all, which produced my favorite moment of the night from the Dais. Sixteen years in here, they said, that's first. The River Christian Church playground dispute came back too, with two neighbors speaking this time instead of one. That one goes back to a permit the Planning Commission turned down in May of 2024. And a council member revived a request for an ordinance restricting panhandling along Highway 14, framing it as a traffic safety problem. The city attorney said he'd look into it. No motion, no direction, and no date so far. Before I let you go, there's two things about what's coming and one that's missing. So the Planning Commission is going to meet on Monday, August 10th again, and then the city council meets Thursday, August 20th. Second reading is expected on both sewer ordinance and the engineering standards. And the sewer penalty moratorium expires August 31st. That's 11 days after the council meeting. So one more thing we're still waiting on. The Board of Adjustment did not meet in July, and the accessory dwelling unit variants that continued on June 10th hasn't been renoticed. So here's the missing piece, and I want to be straight with you about this one. The council also held a retreat on July 9th to work on the sewer ordinance, downtown parking, and ADUs. We know that it happened, but I don't yet have an agenda, notes, or recording, so none of it's in this episode yet or in the written edition. But we've asked the city and we'll cover it when it comes back. Can always take a little bit to get those posted up, and we are very patient. So a last note on sources. Both of these meetings came to us as the city's automatic captions. Again, we try our best to go between the captions and the agendas. So the names, the numbers, and the votes in our coverage come from the written agendas and the packets. Where something only exists on the recording, we try our best to tell you to. So, you've been listening to a production of opengorge.org, home of the Scamania Dispatch and the Click of Taddler. We believe that informed communities are stronger communities. To support our work and stay up to date on everything happening in the Gorge, head over to SchemaniaDispatch.com to sign up for our newsletters. You can find us on Facebook at Facebook.comslash open gorge. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on today's episode. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you next time.