WAC 365-195-760   Integration of SEPA process with creation and adoption of comprehensive plans and development regulations.  (1) The SEPA process is supplementary to other governmental decision-making processes, including the processes involved in creating and adopting comprehensive plans and development regulations under the act. The thoughtful integration of SEPA compliance with the overall effort to implement the act will provide understanding and insight of significant value to the choices growth management requires.

     (2) The growth management process is designed to proceed in phases, moving, by and large, from general policy-making to more specific implementation measures. Phased review available under SEPA can be integrated with the growth management process through a strategy which identifies the points in that process where the requirements of the two statutes are connected and seeks to accomplish the requirements of both at those points.

     (3) In an integrated approach major emphasis should be placed on the quality of SEPA analysis at the front end of the growth management process - the local legislative phases of plan adoption and regulation adoption. The objective should be to create nonproject impact statements and progressively more narrowly focused supplementary documents which are sufficiently informative that subsequent environmental analysis at the individual project stage will, ordinarily, need to be neither extensive nor time consuming.

     (4) While not compromising SEPA's basic aim of ensuring consideration of environmental impacts in advance of development, this approach can serve the goal that project applications be processed in a timely manner.

     (5) In the creation of SEPA documents, maximum advantage should be taken of relevant prior environmental analysis through identification and incorporation of statements prepared by other lead agencies in connection with other plans or projects.

     (6) Planners are encouraged to consult the "SEPA/GMA Workbook" published by the department in January of 1993. The workbook deals in detail with the integration of the two statutory processes.



[Statutory Authority: RCW 36.70A.190 (4)(b). 93-17-040, § 365-195-760, filed 8/11/93, effective 9/11/93.]