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Dayton, Columbia County and the Town of Starbuck are drafting a joint climate element for their state-mandated comprehensive plan updates, a three-way planning arrangement that moved through a run of public meetings this month covering wildfire, drought and the flooding that recurs along the Touchet valley.
The Columbia County Planning Commission took up the climate element at its September 14 meeting at the CCOB Building in Dayton, alongside the Population and Housing Element, the Land Use Element and the Critical Areas Ordinance, according to the county’s posted 2027 Comprehensive Plan Update schedule. Four days earlier, on September 10, the Starbuck Town Council received its own climate-element briefing and discussed floodplain and levee work along with the town’s meeting calendar. The Dayton Planning Commission had already reviewed its version of the update on August 25, covering countywide planning policies, housing, land use, critical areas, zoning and the county’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan alongside the climate work.
The element is not optional. Washington’s 2023 Growth Management Act amendment, House Bill 1181, requires every fully planning city and county to add a climate change and resiliency element to its comprehensive plan, with a mandatory resilience sub-element addressing hazards that climate change makes worse — wildfire, drought and flooding chief among them, under the state’s implementing rule, WAC 365-196-443. Columbia County falls into the group of small Eastern Washington counties — alongside Adams, Asotin, Ferry, Garfield, Grant, Grays Harbor, Klickitat, Lincoln, Okanogan, Pacific, Pend Oreille, Stevens, Wahkiakum and Whitman — with a periodic comprehensive plan deadline of June 30, 2027, then every ten years after that, under RCW 36.70A.130.
What makes the Columbia County version distinct is the decision to write one climate element for three jurisdictions at once. The county, the City of Dayton and the Town of Starbuck have pooled Washington Department of Commerce climate-planning grant money — funded through the state’s Climate Commitment Act — rather than each drafting separately, according to the county’s planning department. Dayton’s own city website confirms the arrangement, stating plainly that the city “has partnered with Columbia County and the Town of Starbuck to create a climate element” for its Comprehensive Plan as required by HB 1181. For a county of roughly 4,200 people and a city budget the size of Dayton’s, sharing one consultant team and one set of workshops instead of three is as much a budget decision as a planning one.
The county has hired White Bluffs Consulting as the prime consultant, working with AC Geo, BERK Consulting and Anderson Perry & Associates, and is running the process through a Steering Committee and an Advisory Committee rather than staff alone. Dena Martin is the county’s listed contact for residents who want onto the distribution list or want to comment before the element is finalized.
The flooding piece of the resilience sub-element is not abstract for the Touchet valley. The county’s planning materials list a “South Touchet Flood Protection and Restoration Strategy” meeting as part of the same process, tying the new climate paperwork to a waterway that has flooded Dayton and the valley below it before and that shows up in local memory long before any state mandate did. Wildfire risk, the other headline hazard in the sub-element, is being folded in alongside the county’s existing Community Wildfire Protection Plan rather than written from scratch — a wheat-and-timber county spends its falls watching harvest dust and equipment for exactly that risk regardless of what Olympia calls it.
What the meetings did not produce, at least in what the county has posted publicly, is a dollar figure for what the shared grant covers, a schedule for when residents outside the three governing bodies get a formal comment period, or any indication of how a resilience plan drafted by an outside consulting team translates into different decisions on the ground — where a levee gets rebuilt, which roads get flood-hardened first, or how a wildfire evacuation route actually changes. The county’s page lists a Climate Planning Advisory Team meeting for December 3, which is the next fixed date on the public calendar. Residents who want the underlying documents before then have one listed way to get them: emailing Dena Martin at the county planning office.
The climate element is one piece of a larger comprehensive plan rewrite due by mid-2027 that will also update how the county and its two incorporated partners handle housing, land use and critical areas — the kind of document that rarely makes news when it is drafted and becomes the rulebook everyone argues over once it is adopted.
Sources: Columbia County Planning and Building, Columbia County 2027 Comprehensive Plan Update, City of Dayton, RCW 36.70A.130, WAC 365-196-443.
