Land use issues and dangerous dog appeals kept Auburn’s Hearing Examiner busy in 2014

The numbers show Auburn's Hearing Examiner was busier in 2014 than he had been in several years

The woman’s Jack Russell Terrier had bitten her 2 1/2-year-old granddaughter in the face and now, in late May at Auburn City Hall, she was appealing the City’s fine and penalties against her, grounded in Auburn’s nine-year-old, potentially dangerous-dog ordinance.

Auburn’s Hearing Examiner, Phil Olbrechts, listened carefully to the appeal, which set the woman not only against a City ordinance but against her own daughter.

After an emotionally charged hearing, Olbrechts affirmed the previous decision.

“I wondered at the time, ‘what am I doing here? This dog has just savagely attacked your granddaughter?’ But it was very emotional,” Olbrechts told the Planning and Community Development Committee Monday as he delivered the annual report of his activities. “Dangerous dog appeals are the toughest to resolve.”

It wasn’t only dangerous dog appeals, however, that kept Olbrechts up late in 2014, cudgeling his brains.

Indeed, the numbers show Olbrechts was busier in 2014 than he had been in several years. In 2012, he held eight hearings, in 2013 he held 10, and in 2014 there were 13. That breaks down to three rezoning hearings, three conditional use permit hearings, two preliminary plat hearings, one home occupation permit, one special exception and three dangerous dog appeals.

Among them, two hearings on conditional use permit applications submitted by Shao Xia Zhu and her husband, Gary Kiefer. The couple wanted to operate two communal residences for up to seven students at a time on Lea Hill in the Rainier Ridge subdivision north of Green River Community College.

At the public hearing May 28 at Auburn City Hall, neighbors of the existing communal residences argued that anything more than four unrelated people — here, college students — in a communal housing situation would run contrary to what they had worked with City leaders for months to achieve, and what City leaders signed off on when they approved the communal housing ordinance in September of 2013 and put into effect on Jan. 1, 2014.

“They were probably the two toughest decisions I’ve ever had to issue, and I’ve held thousands of hearings,” Olbrechts told the committee.

Partly what made the Zhu-Kiefer applications so flinty, what separated them from previous court cases, Olbrechts said, was that neighborhood testimony was grounded on historical impacts of student housing in the neighborhood, as opposed to being mere speculation about what those impacts would be.

Also, that applicants themselves had done a good job managing their holdings without disrupting their neighborhood.

And the possibility that a decision against them would perhaps stereotype students as inherent noisemakers and troublemakers, setting them apart from other renters, which state law does not allow.

Olbrechts decision, issued in late June, approved the couple’s applications. But, as he said, “subject” to such restrictive conditions that perhaps the couple would no longer be able to pursue their plans.