“Climate change is totally subjective,” Robert Clark wrote to the Newcastle Planning Commission, as pushed Comprehensive Plan edits.
Across Washington State, references to mitigating the impacts of climate change and responding to existing inequities and disparities stemming from past land use and transportation decisions are common passages in Comprehensive Plans, which local governments use to guide their long-term decisions. Robert Clark, the mayor of the small city of Newcastle — nestled between Bellevue and Renton — is leading the charge to ensure that their city’s plan is scrubbed of such language.
In a set of written comments submitted to Newcastle’s Planning Commission, Clark asked for a laundry list of changes he wanted to see, including a number of full policy removals, on topics ranging from providing services to underserved communities, anticipating climate change, to practicing racial and social equity, calling them “vague,” “subjective,” or “irrelevant.”
“The climate is always changing. What are you going to mitigate? The hot days or the cold days and how do you do it?,” Clark wrote in response to a proposed policy directing Newcastle to develop initiatives “to mitigate climate change impacts on vulnerable communities and areas,” a fairly anodyne recommendation. He pushed to remove another policy directing the city to work with regional partners on being more resilient to climate change.
Regarding policy directing the City to “acknowledge and empower the contributions of diverse communities and Indigenous Tribes,” Clark wrote: “Everybody is already welcome in Newcastle and the level of involvement of any group or individual is a personal choice. Who decides what programs or polices and what acknowledgement looks like?”
Clark attracted regional attention last year — his first as mayor — when the Newcastle Council narrowly voted to allow the Pride flag to be flown outside city hall, after initially voting to block it. Clark, opposed to the flag being flown, inveighed against not only the LGBTQ community, but also against potential reparations for Black Americans in a diatribe that was covered by the Seattle Times.
“California was a free state with no slaves and nobody is a slave there today,” Clark said at the time. “But they can’t let go and that causes the division and hate and creates victim groups.”
Washington state law guides many of the policies and analyses included in local Comprehensive Plans, with countywide planning policies — like the ones adopted in King County — adding additional requirements, many of which are not optional for local cities and towns. A new requirement that local governments are required to document the history of discriminatory land use policies within their borders has been causing considerable consternation in Newcastle, which was incorporated as a city in 1994.
Newcastle’s initial draft Comprehensive Plan included such documentation, noting that the city could find no direct evidence of the existence of racially restrictive covenants anywhere in the city. “To date, Newcastle staff have been unable to find examples of deeds with racial restrictions or evidence of redlining in Newcastle, largely because those restrictions are illegal and have been removed from title reports,” the draft noted. “That said, there were properties in Newcastle subdivided by CD Hillman in the early 20th century. CD Hillman’s other developments in nearby Renton have been found to have restrictive covenants and were developed around the same time.”
It appears some city leaders, including Clark, have interpreted this as a full exoneration for Newcastle. “The conclusion of this study is that no such discrimination currently exists or has existed since Newcastle was established in 1994,” he wrote as a suggested addition to the plan, to act as a preamble to the required text. “The way it reads one can assume that Newcastle has a checkered past and it makes us look bad,” he wrote.
Push back on this section, and language touching on race and social justice issues more broadly, has not been limited to Clark.
“I think what a lot of people are taking strong exception and objection to, are the notion that the legislature and the county are telling us that we’re racist, that we’re prejudiced, that we’re preventing people of color, economic income levels from moving here, or being able to consider moving here,” Newcastle Planning Commissioner Stuart Blocher said at its first public hearing on the plan, in January. “And I don’t think we like being called racists, or any of those kinds of things.”
On Wednesday night, when the planning commission took a final vote to amend the Comprehensive Plan plan and send it to the city council, the body acted in line with many of Clark’s recommendations, including voting to remove multiple references to equity, race and social justice, and planning with respect to vulnerable communities and areas. In fact, by a 4-3 vote, the commission voted to adopt all of these recommendations as a slate, with very little discussion of any individual policy changes. In a highly unusual move, they also added a caveat that Newcastle city staff should communicate the fact that any changes made might not be aligned with state law.
That was met with opposition from other members of the commission. “Why are we proposing something to go to city council if we have reason to believe it’s not compliant with applicable law?” Commissioner Scott Maresh said. “We are stewards of public resources as members of this commission, and frankly it’s irresponsible […] if we are putting forward policies here that we have reason are going to be in violation of what the county and the state requires of us.”
Among the broad number of changes made: removal of a policy directing Newcastle to merely consider the “protection[s] for renters in residential and commercial spaces to mitigate displacement,” as well as another policy referencing the fact that development regulations should be based on the “best available science.”
“Best Science? Biology is a science that maintains there are 2 genders, male and female. However, social justice warriors ingnore [sic] the science they don’t like. Who determines the science. Take this out,” the document adopted by the planning commission states, in language that exactly mirrors Mayor Clark’s suggestions, typo notwithstanding.
It will fall to the council to decide whether to add any language back in — leaving it out would likely open Newcastle up to a challenge of the validity of its Comprehensive Plan at the state’s Growth Management Hearings Board. Even without these changes, King County’s Affordable Housing Committee found Newcastle’s plan to fall short in a number of areas, including a failure to demonstrate that the city has capacity for emergency housing as well as a failure to show that the city has sufficient housing capacity for lower-income residents throughout the entire city. The nearby City of Mercer Island is already involved in a challenge, filed by the nonprofit group Futurewise, over some of the same state and county requirements.
The Newcastle City Council is set to consider the planning commission’s recommendations at a meeting on March 18. Last fall, Clark lost a major ally on the council when Councilmember Steve Tallman abruptly quit during the middle of a meeting. As it stands, he will likely have trouble garnering a majority of votes to stop the major elements he objects to from being added back.
Ryan Packer has been writing for The Urbanist since 2015, and currently reports full-time as Contributing Editor. Their beats are transportation, land use, public space, traffic safety, and obscure community meetings. Packer has also reported for other regional outlets including Capitol Hill Seattle, BikePortland, Seattle Met, and PubliCola. They live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
