3/14/2024 0 Comments Pierce county parcel mapPurdy’s pro- and anti-urbanization advocates will have months of hearings, briefings and other opportunities to make their cases as the comp plan update wends its way to completion. “I think the footprint of Purdy has really remained the same since the early ’90s,” when the area was first made a UGA, she said. Purdy “never was an urban center and it’s not one now,” Ferrell said. Ratcheting down the development allowed in Purdy will help safeguard the area’s environmental resources, including Burley Lagoon and Henderson Bay shoreline and salmon-bearing Purdy Creek, said Ferrell, who is also on the board of community group Friends of Burley Lagoon. Limiting traffic on thoroughfares like Purdy Drive and 144 th Street NW would protect Peninsula High School and Purdy Elementary School students who walk and bike there, she told attendees of a briefing on the comprehensive plan update at a Key Peninsula Land Use Advisory Commission meeting on Jan. Wendy Ferrell, a fifth-generation Purdy-ite who lives on land homesteaded by her great-grandfather, said the retraction of UGA status is exactly what the community needs to retain its small-town feel and protect its abundant natural features. “There is nothing rural about and it would not be desirable or appropriate for rural uses,” he wrote.īut some residents are cheering on the idea of Purdy no longer being an urban growth area. State Routes 16 and 302 define Purdy’s east and west edges and there’s even a Sound Transit Park & Ride as a starting point for extending urban-level mass transit, he noted. Those business support hundreds of jobs in the area. Those include two gas stations four restaurants grocery stores and other retail businesses professional services utility company offices and maintenance yards. Purdy already looks and feels like a small city, with “an impressive range of commercial uses,” Yester wrote in a letter to the county. Yester said the firm feels “whipsawed” about the proposed downzoning, since Pierce County OK’d the upzone to MUD of Rush’s Purdy holdings just 7 years ago, allowing higher density development. The company is lobbying Pierce County to recognize what Rush says are flaws in the rationale being used to justify retracting Purdy’s UGA status. But with UGA retraction, the 44 acres would be reclassified as rural, said Rush Companies Development Manager Steve Yester. Current Mixed Use Development (MUD) zoning allows a mix of commercial and single- and multi-family residential development on this property. One of the UGA’s largest landowners, Gig Harbor-based Rush Companies, controls 38 acres in Purdy and is working with owners of 6 adjacent acres, all to the south and east of Peninsula High School.
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