PEPPER FISHER
Sequim – The City of Sequim was threatened with a lawsuit at Monday night’s council meeting if it does not exclude the Seabrook company’s Westbay project from its current moratorium on applications for Master-Planned Overlays.
City staff expect that the moratorium will only be necessary while they prepare the 2025 Comprehensive Plan update, which is scheduled for completion in June of next year. But attorney Kris Wilson, representing John Wayne Enterprises, the owners of the planned Westbay property, claims that in 2019 the city council directed staff to remove the sub-area planning requirement from the comp plan, but it didn’t happen. If it had, she said the Westbay project would not be included in the moratorium.
“There is no need to include Westbay in this pause on master plan processing. And to impose a moratorium in these circumstances is improper. If the City proceeds to cause improper damages to John Wayne Enterprises and the property sale that has long been known to this community, then it will be forced to challenge the moratorium and seek damages.”
Wilson said her client wants the City to remove Westbay from the moratorium and to ask City staff to come back to the council with a plan, as soon as next week, to fix the comp plan and its code by the end of the year.
Seabrook’s land use attorney, Heather Burgess, stopped short of threatening a lawsuit, but also asked for Westbay to be removed from the moratorium, and said she has been offering to help the City Attorney’s office to provide solutions to amend the comp plan in the way that she said Council directed staff to do in 2019.
Seabrook’s Chief Financial Officer, Jeff Gunderson, gave what sounded a lot like an ultimatum.
“The reality is this. If the city cannot commit to resolving the issues needed by the end of the year to allow processing of our application, I don’t see a viable path forward for Seabrook on the Westbay project. To date, Seabrook has invested over 1.4 million dollars into the Westbay project. We have to seriously consider whether it makes sense to continue when there is no clear end in sight. We need the city to engage with us constructively, and honor the policy direction that was already set by this council in 2019.”
We reached out to City officials for a statement about whether Monday night’s comments would affect their actions going forward but have not received a response.