Published September 2005

Property owners get
caught in political quagmire

I’ve never met Edwin Stocker, but he is a kind of ideological hero for many.

Mr. Stocker is the farmer who owns, appropriately, Stocker Fields in Snohomish, the now infamous soccer fields – along with a dozen or so baseball fields throughout the county - caught up in Growth Management Act violations.

If you haven’t been following the story, the short of it is that Mr. Stocker and other property owners in mostly rural parts of the county have addressed the shortage of ball fields in the county by letting soccer and baseball leagues play on their farms.

The conversion of a fallow farm field to a soccer or baseball field is about as complicated as moving the heifers into the back forty, running a few chalk lines, and setting up a port-a-potty. Not even a tractor involved.

But apparently the Growth Management Act didn’t allow this sort of use on these rural properties. So last year, the ball fields faced being shut down for good, leaving kids with nowhere else to play.

After this issue floated into the public discussion for a while, legislators jumped on the situation in the spring session and created an exemption of sorts such that the properties are all allowed to continue to be used as ball fields.

The fields were saved.

Or were they?

Now the farmers, Little Leaguers, and soccer moms have get permits from the county. Permit fees range from $1,500 to $15,000 depending on whether a traffic study is required.

The problem is that few of the organizations or property owners have the sort of budget — especially on short notice — to come up with the permit fee. So the window is open, but now they have an economic hurdle that is just as daunting.

None of this seems to make sense to Edwin Stocker. “My fields, my land, my deed — it’s mine to do with what I want,” he said in referring to his field of dreams.

Planning is critical to successful outcomes in many endeavors. The Growth Management Act is supposed to organize uses and create a plan for Washington so that growth can be managed in a way that ensures quality of life, traffic planning, and parks along the way.

It’s supposed to put urban uses in urban areas. Ball fields, it contemplates, would be located close to where the kids live in the urban areas. That sounds sensible.

But this vision has never quite come about. It’s just too expensive to assemble land in an urban setting. Economics favor more housing in most cases and even then there isn’t enough to meet demand.

That leaves the government carrying the load for formation of parks and ball fields in the cities. With government already stretched, however, this is not a viable solution.

As a result, well-meaning property owners linked up with youth organizations and solved the problem themselves by exercising rights they figure they ought to be able to exercise — particularly when they are using their private property for the public good.

To Mr. Stocker and others like him, the situation is simple. “My field has been in operation for 30 years,” he said. “Who’s helping the county?”

Indeed, he and other property owners are helping the county by solving a problem the government isn’t able to.

So it seems absurd that the government wants to come in and tell him he can’t do it any more.

And then when they change their own rules and grant him permission to continue, he faces a fee? You don’t need to be a practical thinking farmer to see the silliness in this.

Ahh, but good news is ahead. There’s another legislative session coming soon where the current group of rules makers will make another rule on top of the rule they made to fix the rule they just fixed and this little permit fee problem might go away.

And, of course, they will take credit for saving youth sports while farmer Stocker and the other private citizens who have really fixed it mow the lawn and clean out the port-a-potty’s.

Tom Hoban is CEO of Everett-based Coast Real Estate Services, a property management and real estate advisory company specializing in multi-family and commercial investment properties. He can be contacted by phone at 425-339-3638 or by e-mail at tomhoban@coastmgt.com.

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