# The Mayor's Bold Action Plan: A Committee of the Whole Session on Housing, Rules, and Rental Rights ## Meeting Overview On a crisp December afternoon, the Bellingham City Council's Committee of the Whole convened for a marathon session that would tackle some of the most consequential housing policy questions facing the city. With Council President Hammill excused, President Pro Tem Hollie Huthman shepherded six council members through eight agenda items across nearly three hours of deliberation. The meeting's centerpiece was Mayor Kim Lund's ambitious Executive Order 2024-02, dubbed "Expanding Housing Options in Bellingham," which proposes sweeping changes to how the city approaches development, parking, and housing supply. But the session also revealed deep philosophical divides among council members about the relationship between housing production and affordability, the proper role of city enforcement in tenant protection, and the pace of policy change in a housing crisis. What emerged was both consensus and conflict: unanimous support for technical measures like budget amendments and contract approvals, but spirited debate over whether eliminating parking minimums would create affordable housing or simply enrich developers. The meeting showcased both the promise and the peril of municipal policymaking in a housing emergency—the determination to act boldly tempered by concerns about unintended consequences and equity. ## The Housing Emergency Response: Executive Order 2024-02 Mayor Lund opened with a clarion call for urgency. "Quality affordable housing and equitable neighborhoods are a foundational part of factors of health, of well-being, for fostering stability, prosperity and opportunity for everyone that lives in Bellingham," she declared. "Bold actions are required to better realize a Bellingham that offers expanded housing opportunities for all members of our community." The executive order represents the most comprehensive housing policy initiative in recent city history, encompassing 16 administrative directives and three proposed legislative changes. The administrative actions range from directing the development review team to adopt a "solution-oriented approach" to seeking new locations for tiny home villages. The legislative proposals are more controversial: eliminating parking minimums citywide, allowing the "infill toolkit" throughout the city, and streamlining design review processes. Planning Director Blake Lyon walked the committee through the timeline, explaining that the first two measures would come before the council as interim ordinances, starting with parking reform at next Monday's meeting. "We are proposing to bring back to the council for you at your next meeting, which is next Monday, a draft or interim ordinance to remove parking minimums from the city's requirements across the board," Lyon explained. The rationale is both practical and philosophical. "The first thing that happens when someone is considering whether it's one unit of housing or several hundred units of housing, is they start with parking," Mayor Lund observed. "It is the foundation from which every unit of housing is born from in our community." ## The Affordability Debate: Production vs. Price But not all council members were convinced that increasing housing production would automatically translate to affordability. Council Member Lisa Anderson emerged as the session's most persistent skeptic, arguing that the executive order missed a crucial opportunity to tie benefits to affordability requirements. "If you look at other municipalities like New York City, they're pretty successful with reducing parking minimums but tying it to affordability," Anderson said. "Same with San Diego. They look at senior housing and affordable housing. Boston and Cambridge also has a policy where they have parking reduction or get rid of the minimums if they're on transportation corridors and it's hooked to affordable housing." Anderson cited sobering statistics: "When we look at our numbers over the next 20 years, 76% of our housing has to be under 120 AMI, and we're not going to get there because the city can't build all of it." Her concern was that without affordability requirements, the parking reforms would simply create more market-rate housing while missing the target demographic most in need. Council Member Michael Lilliquist echoed these concerns while supporting the general direction. "The hope for benefits are better affordability and more housing production. But those are very different things. They don't always go together," he warned. "A couple years ago, Seattle had a huge housing boom and prices were going up very fast during the boom. So you have to realize that increasing supply and affordability don't often go together and sometimes they actually do the surprising thing." Both Anderson and Lilliquist called for mechanisms to tie some portion of the new development opportunities to affordable housing, whether through inclusionary requirements, impact fees, or other tools. ## Strong Support for Bold Action Other council members rallied behind the executive order with enthusiasm. Council Member Jace Cotton delivered perhaps the session's most passionate endorsement: "My heart is racing because I'm so excited about this executive order. This is really tremendous leadership." Cotton emphasized the long-term nature of the housing crisis: "We know that a lack of supply is fundamentally constitutive of our current housing crisis. It wasn't a crisis that was produced over the short run, and we're not going to solve it in the short run. We have to plan for the long term." Council Member Hannah Stone praised the comprehensive nature of the order: "It finally feels like in these rooms where we're publicly talking about how much of a crisis this really is...the actions being a little bit bold, more bold than we've seen in the past couple of years is really so encouraging." Council Member Edwin "Skip" Williams supported the approach of moving forward and adjusting as needed: "I am extremely happy that a decision was being made to move this forward and that as my whole life's existence has always been, to make a decision, move it forward, see where the road bumps are, and then get rid of the road bumps as they surface." ## Tenant Protection Ordinances: The Path Forward The session's latter half focused on two related measures addressing "junk fees" in rental housing—excessive or unfair charges for services like pet deposits, application fees, or parking. City Attorney Alan Mariner and Planning Director Lyon presented three different draft ordinances for each issue: one developed by staff and two reflecting previous council direction. The staff approach took a simpler framework: identify a limited number of allowed mandatory fees and define optional fees that require written tenant consent, while prohibiting all others. "The staff's approach takes an approach that's recommended by the National Consumer Law Center and also has been adopted by at least the city of Olympia," Mariner explained. The council ultimately chose to move forward with the staff drafts but with significant amendments. The most contentious issue was whether the city should have enforcement authority. Staff recommended against it, citing both the high cost—potentially requiring millions of dollars in new staff—and the fundamental shift it would represent in city enforcement practices. "This would represent a fundamental change in the city's code enforcement work by involving the city in a dispute between two private parties over the alleged fees owed," Mariner warned. But council members insisted on retaining enforcement authority, even with limited resources. "I think holding the door open for city enforcement is really important," Cotton argued. "Even the possibility of enforcement has a deterrent effect and even one enforcement case benefits tenants who are unlikely to have the wherewithal to pursue a right of private action." Lilliquist compared it to other enforcement regimes: "The State Patrol doesn't find every speeder, but they find enough speeders often enough that there's general compliance. What we need is the credible risk of enforcement because that's the deterrence." ## Climate Action and Electrification Funding In a brief but positive interlude, the committee unanimously approved a nearly $1 million grant from the Washington State Department of Commerce for home electrification programs. Seth Vidaña, the city's Climate and Energy Manager, explained that the funding would support heat pump installations, electrical panel upgrades, and other equipment to help low- and moderate-income households move away from fossil fuels. "23% of all the emissions that come out of the city of Bellingham are from natural gas. We have 16,000 homes that use natural gas as a primary space heating fuel," Vidaña reported. The program aims to provide "100% cost coverage for these electrification measures for low and moderate income households, meaning they won't have to pay anything for the upgrades." ## Administrative Matters: Budgets and Contracts The committee also handled several administrative items with little controversy. A final budget amendment for the 2023-2024 biennium passed 6-0, addressing overruns in several departments and authorizing a $600,000 interfund loan to cover higher-than-expected workers' compensation claims. The contract award for the North Haven tiny house village utilities and site preparation also passed unanimously, despite some confusion over cost estimates in the documentation. The actual contract amount of $434,910 came in significantly below the engineer's initial estimate, which Public Works officials attributed to competitive bidding. The committee also approved an ordinance cleaning up obsolete sections of the municipal code, removing chapters for defunct boards and commissions as well as provisions preempted by state or federal law. ## Looking Ahead: Implementation Challenges As the session concluded, the scale of the implementation challenge became clear. The parking minimum ordinance will come before the full council for first and second reading on December 16, with a final vote expected in January. The infill toolkit expansion will follow shortly after, with design review streamlining coming later in the year. The tenant protection ordinances will return after staff incorporates the committee's amendments, likely at the January reorganization meeting. A separate work session was scheduled for December 16 to continue refining the proposals. Mayor Lund's executive order represents a dramatic acceleration of housing policy changes that were already required by state law. Whether this "proactive jumpstarting" will indeed translate to more affordable housing options for Bellingham residents remains to be seen. But after nearly three hours of debate, one thing was clear: the council is ready to take bold action, even as members continue to disagree about the best path forward. The December 9 Committee of the Whole session may well be remembered as the moment when Bellingham's housing crisis response shifted into high gear. The question now is whether the city's implementation can match the ambition of its intentions.