POULSBO — The city’s proposed Critical Areas Ordinance would have affected the location of its municipal campus. True or false?

The answer is false, according to City Planning Director Barry Berezowsky.

When the City Council voted 5-2 to purchase property owned by Olympic Property Group on 10th Avenue Nov. 16, 2005, the land was already vested under the city’s existing CAO, he said.

“They already had a short plat for the property, so it was already vested,” Berezowsky said.

As soon as the city began discussing the new CAO in 2004, OPG submitted a short plat for the Westview Business Park, which legally set the buffers for the two wetlands on the site under the existing CAO, he said.

“Regardless as to what we did, the buffers were already set,” Berezowsky said. “Everything was legal.”

Other developers had the same opportunity as OPG and the city to have their projects vested under the existing CAO before the council enacted a moratorium on new building applications near critical areas and on Planned Unit Developments, he said.

“This doesn’t affect all building. We can still issue single- family and subdivision permits as long as they don’t have critical areas,” Berezowsky said.

The moratorium allows the city to protect its existing critical areas and modify its PUD ordinance, he said, adding that the proposed CAO was scheduled to go before the city council in August 2005, but the Washington State Department of Ecology announced changes to its wetlands in urban environments policy and asked that the city consider the policy as part of its CAO.

“It took us some time to do an in-house review of that,” Berezowsky said. “Once you stop something, it takes some time to get things going again.”

DOE’s modifications kept the city from being able to set its sights on a CAO that would conform to state mandates, Councilman Mike Regis said.

“We kept doing rewrites and chapter development, at the same time, the state kept changing the law,” Regis said, noting that DOE’s change to the way it viewed wetlands in urban areas had a major impact on Poulsbo, because much of the city’s development is along Dogfish Creek.

Changes suggested by the Department of Ecology were one of the reasons the CAO has taken so long to get to this point, said Poulsbo Planning Commission Chairman Barry Babcock.

“We had other things to look at,” Babcock said. “We had things we needed to get done.”

In addition to the changes by the DOE, the planning department’s workload and personnel limitations also were factors, he said.

“We could use a little extra (time), but I think we will get it done this time,” Babcock said.