Updated: City’s Comprehensive Plan draft delayed to June
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, April 22, 2026
Editor’s note: this story was updated with new information obtained after press deadline.
A planned release this month for a draft of the City of Sequim’s Comprehensive Plan 2025 update has been pushed to June.
It was originally set to go live April 1 with an online public comments period to follow, according to city staff.
Karla Boughton, the city’s director of community and economic development, said in an interview that there was a delay in consultants’ findings for different elements of the plan.
She told the Sequim Planning Commission during their April 7 meeting that work on a Transportation Master Plan needs re-calibration to align with new state requirements and a sewer consultant needs more time to work on items related to the city’s Water Reclamation Facility.
Boughton said they’ll need another four to six weeks to finish their work.
“While we’re disappointed in the extension, it does give us time to work on code with more substantive updates,” she said.
Once the draft is released, city staff will open a minimum 30-day comment period and do public outreach efforts before holding public hearings with the Planning Commission and ultimately the Sequim City Council for final approval.
Boughton said the council’s adoption may not come until the fall.
She told planning commissioners, though, that the updated timeline “may be a worst case scenario.”
Sequim City Council last approved the city’s Comprehensive Plan update in 2015.
The state mandated update, while not an implementation document, helps the city plan for population and employment growth through the year 2045 under the Growth Management Act.
Staff write that by 2045, they’re planning for the City of Sequim to grow by an additional 2,959 residents, 909 jobs, and 1,850 housing units.
The housing need for 20 years is projected for an annual growth rate of 1.53%, which follows Sequim’s 1.5% annual growth rate from 2015-2025.
According to the city’s report “Housing and Economic Analysis” from Oct. 2025 by Leland Consulting Group, the city has 483 lots or units finalized since 2020 with 142 of those having permits issued.
Another 343 preliminary plat units have been approved, too, but are awaiting construction permits, are for sale, or the developer has withdrawn the project.
As of October, Lavender Meadows had permits issued for about one-fourth of its 217 manufactured homes and Rolling Hills off South Seventh Avenue had about 35% permits issued for its 215 homes. They are the city’s largest current developments.
Master-planned overlays
The delay in the Comprehensive Plan will also likely lead to another extension of an emergency moratorium on master-planned overlays, large scale developments within the city.
City Attorney Kristina Nelson-Gross asked city councilors for the original moratorium on July 28, 2025 to “ensure that the city regulations, comprehensive plans, and other guiding regulatory documents have reached a level of consistency that will allow the staff, members of the public, and the applicant to have a clear, well defined process.”
The decision delays any permitting within the city on the proposed 600-lot Westbay development by Seabrook Holding Company that they’ve proposed by John Wayne Marina.
A week prior to enacting the moratorium, city staff deemed Westbay “technically incomplete” for a full technical review to continue.
Representatives with Seabrook and John Wayne Enterprises threatened legal action about the moratorium but then retracted their decision, they said in previous interviews.
City staff have said they will ask to continue the moratorium until the Comprehensive Plan update is approved.
City councilors extended the moratorium on Jan. 26 this year. It is set to expire on July 26.
Boughton wrote in city documents in January that councilors can vote to rescind the moratorium before it is set to end if “necessary updates to the Comprehensive Plan and development regulations have been adopted.”
Plan explained
According to city documents, the updated Comprehensive Plan will provide long-range policy direction for land use, transportation, economic development, housing, capital facilities, utilities, parks and recreation, and the natural environment.
It will lay out a community vision and priorities and describe where, how, and in some cases when development should occur, city staff write.
Boughton said through their review process they’re working to provide three key elements: an updated Comprehensive Plan policy document, future land use map, and capital facility plan.
They’re also working on updating the city’s zoning ordinance with full rewrites to ease implementation for the city’s administration and increase the public’s understanding, she said.
Boughton said this is her fifth full work-through on a Comprehensive Plan and since she started with the city about a year ago, she’s tried to open communications with builders and homeowners to improve accessibility to the city’s planning department. She’s also opened a text line.
Boughton said increasing communications intersects with the Comprehensive Plan because development regulations haven’t been looked at holistically for two decades.
“It’s not to change everything but to modernize, and to provide ease of consistency and clarity for the user,” she said.
Some of the proposed updates in the Comprehensive Plan follow newer directives from lawmakers to provide more housing options, such as allowing more accessible dwelling units, with two now allowed on a lot.
She said the main thing the legislature has done for cities like Sequim is remove barriers to increasing housing stock and mandating that different housing types are available for different income brackets, such as apartments, town homes, and duplexes.
Work on the city’s Comprehensive Plan update started in summer 2024 with initial public outreach, and the Planning Commission has been reviewing the plan chapter by chapter since spring 2025.
Eileen Cummings, chair of the Planning Commission, wrote in an email reply that the update of the plan was developed by the city’s planning department, all the city departments, public comments and participation, developers, consultants and the planning commission.
“It’s been a long process, but it has made all the participants think about what they want the future of Sequim to be in 20 years,” she said.
“There will be time in the next 20 years to make amendments, changes, additions after what gets approved this year in this plan is tested by our community and city staff.”
By law, amendments to the Comprehensive Plan can be considered by the city council once a year all at the same time.
Julianne Coonts, vice- chair for the Planning Commission, wrote via email that they “tried really hard to loosen up the language in the code to be less restrictive in order to allow for better and more diverse growth.”
She said the biggest areas of proposed change were with housing, land use and zoning.
“We wanted to make the changes we could to underutilized land use and zoning sections in order to allow for more sustainable growth,” she said.
When the public is asked to engage in the project, Coonts said they appreciate and look forward to the opportunity to consider the public’s opinions and experiences with the plan.
For more information about the Sequim Comprehensive Plan, visit sequimwa.gov/1301/2025-Comprehensive-Plan-Update.
