Island County commissioners don’t always agree on how to approach the Comprehensive Plan Update, due next year.

But they agree that they should get as much public participation as possible.

The board met with members of the Island County Planning Commission during an annual joint meeting Monday. They discussed, and occasionally argued, about their priorities for the county’s land use future.

Counties are required to update their Comprehensive Plan, or Comp Plan, every eight years, ensuring that county regulations are in keeping with both ever-changing state requirements and reflect local priorities.

The updated version is due June 2016.

So far, planners received approximately 600 surveys, both online and collected during recent public meetings.

Commissioner Rick Hannold pointed out that the 600 surveys are but a fraction of the county’s nearly 50,000 registered voters.

“I think you would do far better to have a community discussion to explain the Comp Plan and ask for verbal input,” Hannold said.

Commissioner Jill Johnson said she thought the county was “doing well” to offer multiple ways for people to be involved, providing online and in-person platforms for input.

“People have different preferences,” Johnson said.

Commissioner Helen Price Johnson said she is hearing comments that don’t seem to be getting back to planners, which she described as frustrating to residents in her district.

“They’re finding me, but I don’t think they are finding you in the same way,” Price Johnson said.

Commissioners also agreed that the county’s ordinances need to be more accessible and easily interpreted by the public.

“Our code is not user-friendly in its current form,” said Price Johnson, adding said she’d like to get rid of all the code’s “glaring contradictions.”

“We need to identify areas where we have different priorities,” Johnson agreed.

County staff estimate that they will require approximately 7,480 hours to accomplish the minimum required updates and “code cleanup” to the county’s ordinances.

Commissioners voiced concern that the breadth of work before them will limit the county’s ability to have larger conversations on specific issues and greater public participation.

“What’s our capacity to take on other scopes of work?” Johnson asked.

Long Range Planner Brad Johnson said that the planning staff does have some capacity to take on new discussions but that they “need to be careful of taking on more than we can or missing our deadline.”

“We need to make sure it doesn’t get out of control,” he said.

Discussions not specifically outlined in the Comp Plan update, but listed by Price Johnson as priorities, are the discussion of Freeland as an urban growth area, rural event center regulations and the boundaries for communities like Clinton.

Looking at the county code as a whole, Hannold said he’d like to “get rid of variances” whenever possible to avoid ambiguity.

“My angle would be, I would like it to be cleaned up to the point of reducing the number of appeals to do with language,” he said.

However, the community needs to be clear what they want from their government because “absolutes come at the trade-off of flexibility,” Johnson said.

Johnson said she’d support removing the Board of County Commissioners as an appeals body in some cases because planning is not its expertise. Such appeals would instead go straight to Superior Court, Johnson said.

Johnson said the commissioners’ lack of land-use knowledge may open the county to lawsuits.

Johnson said this is “an old way of going about it … a good-old-boy way” that she’d replace with a “de-politicized” and regulation-based appeal system when it comes to the Comp Plan and the corresponding county ordinances.

“I’d get that moving,” Johnson said.

Hearing Examiner Michael Bobbink agreed.

“If you give them messes in the code, it just gives them all the more argument,” he said.

Bobbink offered to direct part of his retainer as Hearing Examiner to help perform “code scrub” as part of shouldering the manpower needed to complete the Comp Plan update.