Comprehensive Plan

The Kent Comprehensive Plan serves as a road map for the city to follow as it considers decisions related to land use, housing, economic development, services, and a variety of other topics to guide future growth.

Kent’s Comprehensive Plan was adopted in 2015 and includes many climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies related to environmental protection strategies. It also includes policies that promote density to protect the environment, natural resources, and biodiversity.

The Comprehensive Plan is in the process of being updated. The 2044 Comprehensive Plan will describe the city’s vision for the next 20 years and include goals and policies for achieving it.

Kent proactively committed to include climate resiliency as a new element of the Comprehensive Plan. The climate element will include a greenhouse gas reduction strategy and prioritize efforts for climate adaptation. In 2023, a new state law (HB 1181) added a climate goal to the Growth Management Act (GMA) and requires local comprehensive plans to include a climate element. City staff are evaluating next steps to implement the new requirements.

The Comprehensive Plan also:

• Promotes density and the reduction of urban sprawl by planning for land use patterns and transportation systems that minimize air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
• Directs growth to Urban Centers and other mixed-use/high-density locations that support mass transit, encourage non-motorized modes of travel, and reduce trip lengths;
• Facilitates modes of travel other than single-occupancy vehicles, including transit, walking, bicycling, and carpooling;
• Incorporates energy-saving strategies in infrastructure planning and design;
• Encourages inter-jurisdictional planning to ensure efficient use of transportation infrastructure and modes of travel;
• Encourages energy-efficient housing design incorporating solar power and energy-efficient insulation.
• Encourages the maximum utilization of federal, state, and local government programs, including the King County Home Weatherization Program and the City of Kent Energy Efficiency Program, which is intended to help homeowners implement energy conservation measures.
• Goals focused on long-term, sustainable strategy for local and regional natural resource protection, conservation of resources, and natural habitat.
• Protection of the environment and urban separators results in the preservation of wildlife habitat and migration corridors; this enhances ecosystem resiliency in the face of urbanization and climate change.

Development Standards

As the City of Kent continues to grow and urbanize, ensuring that our development is sustainable and as environmentally friendly as possible is a priority. Kent’s 2021 Design and Construction Standards set the minimum requirements for public and private streets, water utilities, sewer, and stormwater utilities.

These standards are crafted to enable the city to achieve goals for neighborhood and transportation connectivity, transportation safety, affordable housing, stormwater management, environmental protection, and cultural resource enhancement in balance with sound and efficient development.

Concerning transportation, the city requires consistent standards to assure multimodal safety needs are met and prioritizes pedestrian and cyclist safety. Ensuring adequate public facilities for multimodal transportation gets people out of their vehicles to reduce total vehicle miles traveled and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from passenger single-occupancy vehicles. 

Building Energy Standards

The City of Kent does not have its own building code, and instead adopted the 2018 International Building Code, the 2018 International Residential Code and the Washington State Amendments, which includes Energy Conservation codes.

Clean buildings are essential to meeting our state and county energy goals. In 2019, the Clean Buildings bill was signed into law and later expanded in 2022. Its objective is to lower costs and pollution from fossil fuel consumption in the state’s existing buildings.

The law directs the WA Department of Commerce to develop and implement an energy performance standard for covered buildings and multifamily buildings. The law also provides incentives to encourage building owners to make energy efficiency improvements earlier than required.

Buildings are the most rapidly growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Washington state, and investment in building energy efficiency is the most cost-efficient way to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as the life span of a building can be 50-100 years.

The 2019 Clean Buildings Act created energy performance standards for commercial buildings larger than 50,000 square feet, with mandatory compliance beginning in 2026. By 2031, the state law calls for updates to the energy code to reduce 70% of the annual energy consumption from buildings compared to a 2006 baseline.

Washington first adopted the Washington state energy code in 1977. The State Building Code Act and State Energy Code Act (SECA) were passed by the legislature in 1985. Senate bill 5854 in 2009 adopted and enacted the 2006 energy code formally.

Environmental Impact Statements

During the development process, our Economic and Community Development department ensures that Environmental Impact Statements are prepared for areas if there is potential for a “probable significant, adverse environmental impact.”

These provide a baseline for understanding the potential consequences of proposed projects, and identifies positive and negative effects on the environment while offering alternative actions as they relate to a particular project.

For example, the preservation and restoration of native plant materials, particularly near streams and wetlands, are required for new development to protect environmental quality for fish and wildlife habitat.

The city will continue to protect and enhance natural resources and climate resiliency through development standards, a variety of capital improvement programs, preservation of the health of environmental resources through monitoring and maintenance, and opportunities to support regional efforts to preserve our resources for future generations.

 Low-Impact Development

The city requires the use of Low Impact Development (LID) technologies per the current Kent Surface Water Design Manual (KSWDM). LID is a stormwater management and land development strategy applied at the parcel and subdivision scale that emphasizes conservation and the use of existing natural site features integrated with engineered small scale hydrologic controls to more closely mimic pre-development functions.

The goal of LID is to prevent measurable harm to streams, lakes, wetlands, and other natural aquatic systems from residential, commercial and industrial development sites.

LID technologies include stormwater best management practices designed to reduce runoff from development using infiltration, evapotranspiration, or stormwater reuse. Examples of LID technologies include trees, preservation of native vegetation, porous pavement, bio-retention swales, infiltration systems, dry wells, cisterns, and rain gardens.

LID technologies proposed within the public right of way must be approved by Public Works Operations during the permit process before any civil construction permit is issued.

Going Paperless

Across all city departments, efforts have been and continue to be underway to reduce and eliminate the use of paper resources, which will reduce waste significantly.

The city’s Law, Courts and Police Departments have been paperless for years. Our ECD department moved to paperless permitting in 2020, and the City’s Clerk’s office is working diligently to continue the scanning of documents into a digital system toward an end goal of eliminating the use of paper resources in as many areas as possible.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the total generation of paper and paperboard in municipal service waste (MSW) was 67.4 million tons in 2018, which was 23.1 percent of total MSW generation that year.

Not only does going paperless eliminate thousands of pounds of paper per year from the waste pipeline, but it also directly contributes to the reduction of harmful greenhouse gas emissions by decreasing reliance on paper and cutting off demand at the source.

The paper industry is responsible for toxic emissions from pulp and paper mills, including Carbon Dioxide, the main contributor to climate change as a greenhouse gas; papermills also create harmful wastewater discharge. 

Transportation

The transportation system provides the necessary mobility for people, goods, and services in and around Kent, and we want to ensure our transportation system has the lowest possible impact on our environment while supporting climate resiliency efforts.

Kent’s transportation planning has evolved over the last several years from a mostly vehicle-based to a balanced transportation plan. The current Transportation Master Plan (TMP) was adopted in March 2021 and includes a balance of vehicle, pedestrian, transit, and bicycle projects. 

The plan also includes many projects to expand the non-motorized transportation system.  Also included are projects to support the growth of transit in Kent in both light rail and bus service.

Many of the city’s future transportation projects in the TMP include new sidewalk and bike lanes or shared-use paths to encourage active transportation modes.  Many arterial projects also include midblock pedestrian and bicycle crossings on arterial streets to further encourage non-vehicle transportation.

Traffic Signals

Over the last several years the city has converted all the traffic signal displays to high-efficiency LEDs.  This lowers the electricity consumption for each of the city’s 119 traffic signals. Solar-powered traffic devices are also used where practical. 

These include solar-powered school zone beacon systems and solar-powered pedestrian-activated crosswalk beacons.  Kent also uses higher efficiency batteries where available for our solar-powered systems and the uninterruptable power supplies for the traffic signals.

Over the past several years, the city has connected close to all the traffic signals to a central traffic signal computer system.  This improves efficiency and reduces energy consumption by allowing the traffic signals to be remotely coordinated which reduces vehicle delays and improves air quality. 

The remaining corridor traffic signals that are not currently connected to the central traffic signal system are programmed to be connected in the next few years.  The communications network that connects the traffic signals also uses low power consumption network switches.

Kent works with King County Metro to implement transit signal priority (TSP) on the existing RapidRide A line on Pacific Highway.  This increases the efficiency of public transportation and makes it more attractive to people traveling in Kent. 

The city is also working with King County Metro to implement TSP on the forthcoming RapidRide I line that will connect Auburn and Renton through Kent and the Kent Station transit hub.