Jacob Dimond / jake@yelmonline.com
Several changes to the 2025-2045 Yelm Comprehensive Plan, regarding local housing, transportation and climate, were unanimously approved by Yelm City Council during a meeting on Tuesday, April 28.
Gary Cooper, Yelm planning and building manager, highlighted these changes to the plan and noted the updated version is a 110-page document. He spoke in regards to some of the most “alien points” in the plan.
“This update was required by the growth management act and State Department of Commerce,” Cooper said. “We’re required to do a comprehensive update every 10 years. I’m always careful to say that. It doesn’t mean we rewrite the document — it means we look at it comprehensively and if there are things we need to change, we change them. The things we don’t need to change, we don’t.”
One of the biggest points of emphasis in the update to the plan was related to housing due to new housing legislation that required the City of Yelm to plan for affordable housing options.
Another large change to the plan, according to Cooper, was related to transportation as legislation, yet again, was passed and led Yelm to look at more strategies for multimodal transportation.
Cooper added that multimodal transportation includes transit, bicycle lanes, pedestrian routes — or essentially more ways to get people out of their cars.
According to the planning and building manager, the final point of emphasis comes from a brand new chapter in the plan — climate.
“We have a brand new chapter and it’s a climate chapter,” he said. “We received grant money to do that. The city did not have to pay for that particular part of the comp plan. We got started on this three years ago, and got off on the wrong foot at first.”
He specified that there was a consultant that the City of Yelm wasn’t able to work productively with — leading to their release from the contract after several months. From there, most of the comprehensive plan was done “in-house.”
“Most of the work in the comp plan has been done by staff, with the exception of the transportation element,” Cooper said. “We had SCJ Alliance as our consultant for that and for the climate element, we had Confluence Environmental because they had to do a lot of data and modeling.
“One thing I really like about the comp plan, which had nothing to do with the required update, but I think it’s a lot more attractive of a document to look at before. It was all just text before. We made a nice effort to make it more engaging for readers with photographs, graphs and different kinds of data.”
Councilor Brian Hess looked at the economic development section of the plan and claimed it was just a few pages long. He added that Thurston County Economic Development Council (EDC) gave Yelm City Council “a lot more” and he asked Vaccaro why the plan didn’t include what the EDC recommended for Yelm?
“I don’t know if I have a great answer to that in terms of the economic development council,” Vaccaro said. “We did reach out to the chamber and sought their input on multiple occasions. I don’t really have a solid answer for that piece.”
Councilor Stephanie Kangiser told Vaccaro that the plan is beautiful, and that a lot of key points were developed throughout it.
“I think that every single person that has any doubt about how we’re planning the City of Yelm should take a peak. It’s on our website and easy to access,” Kangiser said. “The pictures are, of course, beautiful. Some of the points I really appreciated are some of the tables in the chart, points to 10% of our population is commuting outside of Yelm. Being able to create a Yelm that is livable and workable would be absolutely amazing.”
