News Release No. 2006-9

October 19, 2006

Whatcom County Court to Review County's Method to Measure Parcel Size

A lawsuit has been filed in Whatcom County Court challenging the decision to deny a property owner a division of land into two 10-acre parcels because the parcel to be divided was not 20 acres, but just 19.1, as measured by the county's GIS system.

The matter came to the court at the request of property owners Richard Durhack, Virginia Norgaard and Neva Durhack. The Durhacks applied for a simple land division of a parcel on San Juan Island, which, at the time it was acquired, was believed to be 20 acres in size. The Durhacks desired to divide the land into two parcels of equal size.

The County planner working on the application checked with the County assessor and learned the assessor measured the parcel size as 19.1 acres. Because the land use area required 10 acres per parcel, the application was denied. On August 30, 2006, Hearing Examiner William H. Nielsen upheld the denial on the grounds that the parcels created would be smaller than the minimum required when measured by the procedure specified in the County code.

Prosecutor Randall K Gaylord explained that before satellites, parcel size was measured by surveyors. If parcels were not surveyed by metes and bounds, assumptions were made that portions of sections could be measured using fractions and basic mathematics. For example, a section was presumed to be 160 acres; a quarter section would be 40 acres, and so on.

Using satellites, a parcel size can be measured more precisely and take into account the effect of the curvature of the earth and minor discrepancies in the location of monuments.

The issue that the lawsuit will present is whether the County properly used the assessor's measurement of parcel size using the GIS parcel map. The challengers claim the County's decision was inconsistent with prior practice and is not required by state law or local ordinances.

"The County had the ability to choose the method of measuring parcel size, and it chose the method using the GIS parcel map when the code was adopted in 1998," said Gaylord. "Although, there is an alternative method that may be more favorable, that fact alone does not mean that the method used by the County was wrong." Gaylord added.

The hearing on the merits of the case will be held in Whatcom County Superior Court in the beginning of 2007.

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