2017-10-30 Hearing Transcript - Amendments to PC Rule 9 (Joint Meeting)

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personal problem with authorizing the retroactive approval. I know the procedural issues that are going to come up, but I still have a personal problem authorizing the retroactive approval of dozens if not hundreds of permits that I have no idea what's in them or anything about them. Now, that may be the case with future permits, but at least in the future I have the opportunity to investigate them as they come up. When they come up. Thank you. DARROW: Thank you. HENKEL: Any other questions? I do have a question. Everything we've talked about so far is the first slide. Are we going to be acting on the individual portions of this or? DARROW: Correct. HENKEL: Okay. Please proceed then. DARROW: Just to bring clarification to this particular rule change, there have been a number of—since Act 153 was initiated and approved in 2011, there was an attempt by the Department and the Commission to change the rules. Unfortunately, it did not change. There was—the Planning Commission deferred the action and the Planning Department has been working on the major rule change to be able to bring that. There's been, it hasn't been an easy process. There's a lot of difficult issues to be able to define as we go through the rule change. We did not have any of the permits be appealed until recently, and that's when this, this issue came to a forefront. All those previous SMA Minor Permits that were approved were approved with no problems. There wasn't an appeal or anything. So, this recent appeal that happened, it was brought to our attention from our Corporation Counsel regarding this conflict in the rule. As a result of that, our Director rescinded that minor permit and has been acting accordingly in regards to the 125 -limit until we change the rule at this time. I do not believe it is the intention of the Planning Director or the Department to not effectively line up with State law as soon as possible. What we're trying to do here is in this change, make it known that even if State law changes and our rule doesn't change, we still can operate under that change until we line up our rule through this amendment. JACKSON: Chair Henkel, can I add to that? Commissioner Clarkson, I understand your concern about having it be open-ended. You know, you're always going to have a lag between the time period of when a State law passes and when we can get a joint meeting together. There's always going to be a period of lag, but I think what I'm hearing from you is you don't want to go on for years without changing the rules. And, if there's a way that we can modify this language to account for that, that would be great, but we also have to consider what happens if we try to do a rule change like we did in 2012 and the Commission still doesn't want to change their rules. Then, we're caught in this limbo of not being able to issue permits until that rule is changed. So, I think it might be a good idea to have them—have it not be open-ended, but how exactly to word that, we'd be open to suggestions. CLARKSON: Well, I just have a concern with a rule that says the Director can follow procedures that are counter to our rules if the State law has been changed even until we change EXHIBIT A 26