The Grays Harbor County Shoreline Master Program is up for review for possibly the final time. The state Department of Ecology opened the public comment period on Oct. 29. It runs through 5 p.m. Dec. 3.

There is at least one major difference in the rewritten plan.

“Our old plan put shorelines that are in the conservancy environment and their associated flood plains in the shoreline jurisdiction,” county Principal Planner Jane Hewitt said. “The new proposal does not extend to the flood plains.”

A “conservancy environment” is similar to a zoning district, Hewitt said. She added that mostly gravel and agricultural operations will be the beneficiaries of not being beholden to the Shoreline Master Plan.

Ecology’s preferred way to receive comments is online at tinyurl.com/GHC-SMP http://ws.ecology.commentinput.com/?id=SBmuP.

“All interested parities are invited to provide comment during this public comment period,” reads Ecology’s website. “There are several ways to provide comments. You only need to submit your comments once.”

The public also can mail comments to Kim Van Zwalenburg, Washington Department of Ecology, Southwest Regional Office, P.O. Box 47775, Olympia, WA 98504-7775. Her email is kim.vanzwalenburg@ecy.wa.gov.

The update also will replace hand-drawn maps with more-accurate versions.

“The mapping has to be exact as to whether it’s in or out of the shoreline jurisdiction,” Hewitt said. “So the mapping is going to be a big improvement.”

She also said that the language is much clearer.

“Most of this code was probably written in 1973, and often times, it doesn’t even list an activity that somebody is proposing,” Hewitt said.

The new Shoreline Master Plan also encourages agencies and other entities to improve infrastructure, like boat ramps, before putting in another one, and to have better access rather than more access.

The process of this revision began in 2003 when the state Legislature updated its 1972 Shoreline Master Act, Hewitt said. In 2013, the county received state grant money from Ecology to update its Shoreline Master Plan.

The existing SMP, in large part, is the original plan enacted in 1974. There were some changes dealing mainly with coastal waters in 1991.

Shortly after the Ecology grant funds became available to the county and with the help of consultant John Kliem’s Creative Community Solutions, “the Commission formed a committee to work on a draft of the update,” Hewitt said.

What’s up for review today is the result of the committee’s at least 25 meetings from May 2014 through January 2017 with input from other interested parties from across the county.

“We specifically reached out to people from the agriculture community, conservation community, aquaculture community,” Hewitt said, “from all sorts of the agriculture community, not just row-crop folks but cranberry folks, who have sort of different interests in shoreline issues. We had someone from the commercial fishing industry on the fish side, not the oyster side – an engineer. A pretty wide variety of viewpoints. That committee came to every meeting and there was a core of 10 to 12 people who came and give feedback on each iterative draft of language.”

“It’s not a creative process. The guidelines that Ecology gives to the degree to which it has to agree with state law puts lines on the road basically.”

This Shoreline Master Plan regulates land in the county outside cities’ or others’ jurisdiction.