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The public comment window closed September 20 on Skamania County’s rewrite of its critical areas ordinance, the county code that decides how close a homeowner, a logger or a builder may come to a wetland, a stream bank or a stretch of Columbia River shoreline before the rules change from a suggestion to a stop sign. The county’s planning division confirms the deadline passed with the update still headed toward a Board of County Commissioners vote this fall, driven by a state clock the county does not control.
Washington’s Growth Management Act requires Skamania County to finish updating its critical areas and flood damage prevention regulations by December 31, 2026. The county and the City of Stevenson notified the state Department of Commerce of their intent to adopt on July 22, starting the mandatory 60-day review clock that closed this month. What comes next is ordinary and easy to miss on a county calendar: a Planning Commission review, then adoption by the three commissioners, Steve Roberts, Dan Tjossem and Greg Zickau, sometime before the year turns over. No hearing date has been posted yet.
The ordinance itself, Title 19 of county code, is not new. It already treats wetlands, streams and their buffers as protected ground, generally off-limits to grading, filling, logging or structures without a variance. What the update revises is the flood damage prevention chapter alongside it, chapter 15.18, and, according to the county’s own materials, the standard for how a landowner proves a project won’t harm a critical area in the first place.
That proof is where the ordinance stops being an abstraction. Reporting by the independent Skamania Dispatch newsletter, covering the same rule as it moved through neighboring North Bonneville earlier this year, put a number on what compliance costs: a Critical Areas Report, the wetland delineation, stream identification, habitat assessment and buffer analysis a qualified consultant has to produce before a permit moves forward, runs $4,500 to $8,500 per property. In a county where the timber economy that once employed the region has been gone for decades and where a modest lot near the Gorge can already carry scenic-area review on top of ordinary permitting, that is not pocket change for the kind of owner-builder who still does most of the construction here.
The county’s own materials note one boundary state law puts on the rewrite: Skamania cannot use the critical areas update to impose a moratorium on permits for STEP housing, the state’s manufactured and modular options meant to add housing stock faster than conventional construction. Cities and counties statewide are barred from blocking transitional shelter or supportive housing in zones that already allow hotels or residences. That is a guardrail against the update being used to slow housing indirectly, but it does not touch the buffer and study requirements that apply everywhere else in the county, including the shoreline lots along the Columbia that draw the most building interest and the most scrutiny.
This is the same commission and the same county that spent August adopting a data center moratorium, Resolution 2026-22, unanimously and after eight residents spoke in favor of a pause, with its own state-mandated public hearing now expected October 13. Two land-use fights, one clock set by Olympia and not by Stevenson, are converging on the commissioners’ boardroom this fall. Neither is a ban. Both put the county in the position of writing rules to a state deadline for growth nobody in Skamania asked to manage on this timetable, whether it is server farms eyeing cheap Bonneville power or a family trying to build a house within sight of a wetland.
What the public comment period did not produce, at least in what the county has posted, is a tally of who spoke or what they asked changed. That silence matters in a county this size: eight residents turning out for the data center moratorium was newsworthy. Whether landowners along the county’s streams and shorelines turned out in similar numbers for the critical areas rewrite, or whether the update passed through with little public notice at all, is not yet answered by the record the county has made public. The Planning Commission’s recommendation, whenever it is scheduled, is the next point where that record gets tested in public.
For now, the practical takeaway for anyone with property near a mapped wetland, stream or shoreline in Skamania County is that the rules governing what they can build, and what they will have to pay a consultant to prove first, are set to change before the calendar turns to 2027 — and the commissioners have not yet said exactly when the public gets one more chance to weigh in before they vote.
Sources: Skamania County Community Development, Skamania Dispatch, Skamania County Code, Title 19
