People living in two Morris Road areas can officially consider themselves Yelm residents after the City Council unanimously voted to annex the two urban growth properties into city limits.
Gary Cooper, the City of Yelm’s planning and building manager, conducted a public hearing for annexations during a Yelm City Council meeting on Aug. 22. As part of a mandatory review by the Thurston County Boundary Review Board, Thurston County requested that the proposed annexations be expanded to create more “logical municipal boundaries” and to include right-of-ways of adjacent roads.
Before the public hearing began, Mayor Joe DePinto stated the purpose of the hearing was for the council to hear and consider the facts relating to annexing areas in the Yelm Urban Growth area into the City of Yelm.
Yelm city councilors could either approve or reject the proposed annexations but could not revise the proposed boundaries.
“An urban growth area under growth management is an area that should be annexed by a city within 20 years of it being designated as an urban growth area,” Cooper said. “They’re slated to be annexed. It’s just a matter of when. When we met in May, we were presenting to you five different annexations, all of which the council voted to approve. Now after that happens, there’s a process we have to follow. We send those, as approved, to Thurston County Boundary Review Board, an independent review board in the county. That board is responsible for distributing the annexations that were approved by the council to other jurisdictions that could potentially be affected by it. Those jurisdictions could be the county, a lot of times a fire district, and entities like that.”
Those affected by annexations can request the Thurston County Boundary Review Board review the boundaries within 45 days, to modify the boundary of proposed annexations, but must provide good reasons for it, Cooper said.
“The county requested that both of these annexation areas be expanded. There were two reasons for that,” Cooper said. “One: The annexation legal description as it was originally presented for both of these did not include the full right-of-way for adjacent roads. For example, Grove Road here, we wanted to make sure we included the entire right-of-way because we didn’t want the city maintaining one half of the road and the county maintaining the other. The second (reason) is based on what they call the logical boundaries issue.
“It creates issues in terms of confusion about services,” Cooper continued. “For example, anything that’s in the county is obviously covered by Thurston County Sheriff’s [Office] and anything that’s in the city is covered by the city [police]. The City and the County do have mutual aid agreements.”
Cooper said they received a letter from the “Alexander Estate” in the proposed annexation area, and they were opposed to the annexation. The letter did not explain why they were opposed.
“The boundary review board felt that the County had made its case. There’s certain criteria they have to review to make sure it’s a legitimate request, and they voted to approve these to expanded areas,” Cooper said. “The boundary review board would need to make findings that it’s not a legitimate annexation. They honestly didn’t consider the comments too much because there were no reasons for why it shouldn’t be annexed given in the letter.”
The other area up for annexation, Cooper said, was the Crist property.
“It is sandwiched in between the Kempinski properties above, and Mr. Kempinski actually wanted to be annexed but missed the deadline for applying,” Cooper said. “Of course the property below, the Crist property, [the owners] wrote a great letter about their property and historic use on it. It’s been a farm for at least a generation or two, and they were opposed because they didn’t want the annexation to affect their ability to continue farming.”
The response in the hearing was twofold, Cooper said. He said being annexed doesn’t mean the use of the property has to change and added that it’s a legal, non-conforming use because the zone they’ll be assigned is in a residential zone.
“We are now at a stage where it’s either we adopt these annexations as proposed or we reject them entirely,” Cooper said. “We don’t have the authority to change the boundaries that were approved by the boundary review board. If you adopt them, of course they go through. If you reject them they don’t go through at all.”
Following Cooper’s comments, Joanne Brown, whose family owns two properties on Morris Road commented on the annexations.
“My only comment personally is there’s a lot of traffic on Morris Road. My family has lived on this property for over 100 years, and they own the Hammer Smith Mill,” Brown said. “Our comments from our family is that we’re happy to have that property annexed into the city, but what we’d like to see is a road. We’d like to see a road that comes off of Vancil Road and goes through the two properties that are now zoned R6 and connects to Morris Road.”
She added that being under an “R6” title will put a lot of people on those properties, and that there’s already a huge traffic jam on Morris Road during school hours. She added she’d also like to see additions to street lights in the area as well.
Evan Mann, who works for Sound Built Homes and is an active developer in Yelm, tuned in to the Yelm City Council meeting virtually and expressed his support of the annexations.
“Yelm is a desirable community, a lot of positive growth there. As Gary mentioned, these areas are within the growth boundary for the city, so it’s only a matter of time as to when they’d become a part of the city,” Mann said. “I think for these properties, the time is now and it’s a good opportunity for positive growth in the City of Yelm.”
At the conclusion of the public hearing, all of the Yelm city councilors voted in favor of annexing the areas into the City of Yelm.
“Thank you very much council, we have now an annexation. Thank you to the public and all those who attended tonight and made comments,” Mayor DePinto said. “Just to reiterate, we are able to take these new people and these new properties into the City of Yelm due to the infrastructure we are improving.”
DePinto pointed to the Water Treatment Plant, which received $37 million in renovations, as an example of infrastructure improvement locally. He’s hopeful that bypass construction will begin in 2024.
