CCMIN071596 - Laserfiche WebLink

Mr. Roush felt the difficulty is that the interchange is already part of the General Plan. Any action taken to move that project along would not be legislative, merely administrative. In the interests of fairness, if the action could simply be deferred, there would be time to gather signatures. Ms. Dennis referred to the other changes necessary in the General Plan if the interchange is deleted and asked if those changes were the responsibility of the citizens doing the initiative to come up with the environmental work to make the initiative consistent with the General Plan? Mr. Roush indicated the environmental work would not be required whether the initiative was sponsored by the citizens or the Council. Ms. Dennis was concerned that the initiative would be impeded from doing a relatively simple initiative because citizens would have to pay for environmental work in order to make certain the initiative is not rendered invalid because it was not consistent with the General Plan. Mr. Roush felt the solution would be to come up with other amendments to the General Plan to make it internally consistent if the interchange were removed, as opposed to the requirement to do environmental work on a voter sponsored initiative. Ms. Mohr felt this was getting very intricate and had concerns about the ability of citizens to put the package together. Mr. Roush suggested that Council could propose its own initiative to make the General Plan internally consistent. Ms. Dennis summarized that there is really not a simple way to field an initiative. It would be a complex problem to deal with the various General Plan amendments necessary to make it internally consistent and she feared the initiative would be open to legal challenge. Mr. Roush indicated if the initiative measure were simply to delete the interchange from General Plan maps and figures, staff could review the effects on internal consistency and make recommendations to Council about whether other changes need to be made at the same time to keep the Plan consistent and have them voted on within one measure. Mr. Tarver believed there was proposed legislation about this and it indicated the agency would be responsible for reviewing an initiative and making sure it was correct. He agreed that the agency should assist in making sure an initiative is correct, because the agency would have to defend the issue if there were a challenge. Ms. Dennis asked if staff could include direction in this program that allows the city to give assistance to citizens wishing to field the initiative, to make sure the petition contains 07/15/96 -4-