In February, the City Council will be asked to decide whether or not to file for the mayor to go forward with a fire station, City Administrator Chad Sweet said. The project, designed to bring the station out of the tsunami inundation zone, will require bringing the land into the city’s boundaries.

“So the whole idea of this is to do an urban growth boundary swap for an area within the UGB that’s pretty much unbuildable because it’s coastal land.”

In September, the city made a contingent land transfer agreement with the property owner and developer, The Cottages at Gearhart LLC, with the agreement that the city and property owners work with local and federal agencies through the development process to ensure environmental impacts are minimized and all regulations are followed.

While state law has removed statewide restrictions within the tsunami inundation zone, Gearhart has chosen to keep stricter requirements and now allow critical facilities within the tsunami overlay zone. Land off Highlands Lane, at an elevation of about 65 feet, is outside that zone.

“We have to prioritize candidate sites for the UGB swap,” Fregonese said. “We can’t just look at one location, even though we kind of got our eye on this one. We feel like it’s best.”

The city has been working with the state Department of Land Conservation and Development to follow the correct process and achieve the state buy-in, Fregonese said.

The city will need to amend its comprehensive plan and zoning maps to swap the urban growth boundary and apply the single-family residential zone. In order to take effect, the decision to swap areas of the urban growth boundary and amend maps must be concurrent with the city and county. Public hearings will be required at both the city and county levels.

The city has more than 70 acres west of the state’s no-build line that are inside the city’s urban growth boundary and zoned residential.

There are two areas available for the swap, Fregonese said, including about 50 acres of oceanfront land with setback rules prohibiting development. The idea would be to carve off a 34-acre piece to make up for the 34 acres in the north for the firehouse.

Starting February, the city will ask the state to review the material to allow the swap to occur, Fregonese said.

Timing is expected to be complete in April, before the proposed May firehouse bond vote. “It just depends on what they asked for if they want more information, or more clarification that can happen when you go back and forth with these types of reports and applications,” he said.

At the same time the city would have to rezone the county’s 34 acres to city residential zoning.

“And then hopefully by the summer there’s an annexation into the city. So after we have the UGB swap in place the city can then annex that four acres into the city, and then we could begin the development process.”

Typically what happens is the planning commission will have one or two meetings, recommend the comp plan amendments of the zoning change to the city council, he said.

“Then the City Council will have one or two to then adopt those comp plan amendments and zone change,” Fregonese said. “We’d like to work with the county closely to make sure that the timing lines up so we can support them too. I typically attend both the county and the city meetings. So you’ll be seeing a lot of this going through the end of the winter into the spring and getting your own buy-in.”

So the key that we need to know is we need to make sure that the state is going to allow us to do the swap before and then that’s the first step, Fregonese said. “We will know before whether the state is going to say yay or nay on the swap. So even if we’re in the process of doing the comp plan amendments in the zone change we will still know that we’re allowed to do the swap.”

If the vote is passed in May, construction could start the following spring.

If the bond does not pass, Sweet said, the city may consider continuing on with this land swap process even if the bond is available, allowing the city to acquire some higher elevation land for other purposes.