Well. I have been sitting with this all week and I am going to need everyone to pull up a chair because we have a lot to get through. Thirty residential lots on 1.94 acres — thirty, I said — over there near Sprague and Tschirley, and I want you to really picture that for a moment, really sit with the arithmetic of it, because I did the math myself on the back of an envelope on Tuesday and I am not sure the envelope agreed with it either. The Cooper Subdivision, they are calling it. Filed in March, declared complete by the city in April, moving right along — and I am not saying anything is wrong with moving along, I am just saying that the people who actually live here near Tschirley Road might appreciate a slightly slower "along" so they can catch their breath and maybe attend a public comment period without taking half a day off work to do it.
And another thing — because there is always another thing, and this week there are several — we have the 3rd and Barker proposal asking to put 17 lots on not quite three acres, and two more subdivision applications over on 6th Avenue and Tschirley that are also open for public comment, and I want to say to whoever is keeping the calendar at Spokane Valley City Hall that stacking all of this up in the same spring season is a choice and the people who actually live here notice choices like that. I remember when the Barker Road corridor was the kind of place where you could see how the land lay — you could tell what had been orchard and what had been pasture and what somebody's grandfather had fenced off for reasons nobody quite remembered anymore — and I am not saying it should have stayed that way forever, I am just saying it had a character and that character is being subdivided into 17 pieces on May 7th at 9 in the morning at City Hall, which, by the way, is a Thursday, and some of us have places to be on Thursdays. I will circle back to whether the timing of these hearings is a whole separate issue.
Now — and I want to be clear this connects, so stay with me — the County Treasurer's Office had staff out at Spokane Valley City Hall this week helping people pay their property taxes before the April 30th deadline, which I actually think is a fine and decent thing to do, and I have no quarrel with making it easier to pay what you owe. But I could not help noticing, sitting here thinking about property taxes and new lots being carved out of every spare acre in the valley, that when you subdivide 1.94 acres into 30 lots and 2.98 acres into 17 lots, the tax base does a certain kind of growing that tends to look very appealing on a spreadsheet and somewhat less appealing on a street that was not designed for what it is now being asked to hold. I am not an engineer. I am a person who has driven on Tschirley Road. Those are not always the same level of optimism about what that road can handle. The people who actually live here already know this. They knew it before the applications were filed. They will still know it after the comment periods close. That's all for this week. You know where to find me.