A county planner determined that it’s smart, without impact, to build suburban density housing in a designated rural residential setting. 

Owner Nicholas Hurtado of Chile, experienced in developing golf course resorts, high-end housing circling the links, and Jefferson County will derive remuneration from this project but the community, dependent on responsible application of Comprehensive Plan goals and policies, will suffer major losses.  

No small thing, the costs of inadequate infrastructure, lack of surety for water supply, and further degradation to essential habitat.

Jefferson County has framework goals providing direction, focus, and consistency for development:

Framework Goal II: Maintain a rural landscape by smartly growing in urban areas, resorts, and established rural centers and crossroads. Plan for infrastructure needed to care for these communities. Consider environmental, economic, and fiscal sustainability when investing in infrastructure and adding new development in rural and urban places.

The precarity of future adequate water supply is the most veiled of all impacts accompanying this proposal. The PUD, water purveyor, depends on wells for fire flow and ERU (equivalent residential units) requirements, but there is no Quimper Water Basin Study concerning aquifer flows and recharge. In the future, non-potable water may be purchased and treated from Port Townsend’s Olympic Gravity Water System; a system dependent on Big and Little Quilcene Rivers water rights and watershed management, including instream flows for salmon.

Thus, Port Townsend and the PUD are intertwined for future water access. Both are constrained by the nature of nature: fire and climate shift;  development- growth, jobs, investments, profits; watershed functions reduced by clear cutting;  increasing human demand.

There’s no clear planning for long term water access for future suburban developments likely to cascade from this proposal. The impacts come at the expense of sustainable conditions for care of communities, human and environmental.

Discovery Bay Golf Club is not a resort, crossroad or rural center. This density concept acts as a taking from those who invested in an environment defined and secured by Jefferson County’s rural designation. It jeopardizes the future for all who live on the Quimper Peninsula.

Julie Jaman
QUIMPER PENINSULA