Vashon’s community council is kicking off an ambitious effort to update the Vashon Town Plan, beginning with an informational meeting with county officials next week.

At the same time, however, a few islanders are asking what happened to the 2012 update of the town plan, which never went before the King County Council as planned.

“I was shocked when I heard about it,” said Melodie Woods, who helped lead a four-year effort several years ago to update the town plan. She learned earlier this year that changes islanders proposed in 2012 never made it into King County’s comprehensive plan.

“More than anything, I’m disappointed for all the people who worked so hard on it,” Woods said. “Their work was just sort of dismissed.”

What happened with the 2012 town plan proposal isn’t clear. At King County, John Starbard, director of the Department of Permitting and Environmental Review (DPER), said the changes to Vashon’s town plan were not submitted in time to be considered by the county council in 2012. However, islanders involved with the effort say they did submit required documents in time, and county officials never told them otherwise.

Starbard was unsure if there was a miscommunication, in part because the county staff person who was working with islanders then has since retired, but said that person told him the deadline had not been met.

“I would say that they had some important community issues to wrestle with, and it took several years for the community to have that discussion,” he said.

“Meanwhile, the county had an obligation to transmit a comprehensive plan update to the council for the whole county in order to meet that larger deadline.”

Starbard and King County Councilmember Joe McDermott will attend Monday’s meeting of the Vashon-Maury Island Community Council (VMICC) to discuss the Vashon Town Plan and the process of updating it for consideration by the county in 2016. Should a group wish to take up the town plan again, they say the county may have resources to help.

King County has proposed in its current budget the addition of a staff person at DPER who would be dedicated to helping communities across unincorporated King County update their town plans, as many including Vashon’s, are nearing 20 years old. McDermott said he expects the county council will approve the budget item.

“I think we realized earlier this year that there’s a real need to review the town plan on Vashon, and we’re finding similar circumstances in other parts of unincorporated King County,” he said. “To have the staff resources to see that through would be good.”

The Vashon Town Plan, a 100-page document islanders crafted in 1996 with the help of a professional facilitator and hired consultants, lays the groundwork for building laws and zoning codes in an area that incorporates Vashon town and Center.

In 2008, Vashon’s community council decided to update the plan, which is folded into the King County Comprehensive Plan, and formed a committee to take on the task. With little funding and limited help from King County, the Town Plan Committee attempted to gather islanders’ input through monthly meetings, forums and presentations at the community council.

While not all the changes the committee proposed passed the community council’s vetting, nine amendments to the 1996 town plan were passed by those who voted at community council meetings in August and October of 2011.

Some of the approved amendments pertained to historic preservation and water conservation, while one was meant to promote more cycling in town and another banned new billboards and electronic signs. Those involved say the proposals weren’t particularly weighty, and the committee didn’t even get to some sections of the lengthy plan, but they felt good about the recommendations.

“We tried so hard to really get the pulse of the residents of Vashon,” said Natalie Sheard, a key player on the Town Plan Committee and the owner of Café Luna.

Woods sent the nine amendments to King County several months after they passed, in February of 2012, emailing them to Paul Reitenbach, a senior policy analyst at DPER who had been working with the committee. She said the committee had been given an extension for its work, but she believed the amendments met the deadline to go before the council that fall. Reitenbach, who has since retired, acknowledged over the phone that the amendments had been received, she said, and he didn’t say they were late.

It wasn’t until the Vashon Town Plan came back into the spotlight earlier this year that Woods realized the committee’s changes were never made.

When a marijuana edibles company nearly purchased the K2 building last winter, islanders and county officials realized a zoning section of the Vashon Town Plan prevented certain uses, including marijuana business, at buildings in town. The King County Council ultimately updated the plan to allow for marijuana business in town, as well as for the distillery that had moved into a building at Center. At the same time, some islanders called for an update of the entire plan, and others, including Woods, were surprised to learn that nothing had happened with the previous update.

“I was under the impression it had gone through,” said Tim Johnson, who is president of the community council and was copied on Woods’ 2012 emails to the county. “That was the last thing I knew about it until recently.”

Sheard, too, had assumed the town plan had been updated until last week, when she got a call from The Beachcomber. She said she hadn’t followed up after the amendments were submitted, but believed the committee was on track and thought she would have heard if there was a problem.

“To have them now say it’s late is extremely frustrating,” she said. “I hope the new committee will take our work into account.”

Johnson said he, too, was disappointed the updates to the plan weren’t made, but is also looking to the future. Though VMICC meetings have been more sparsely attended since the group was defunded and stripped of its official status in 2012, Johnson says he was pleased to learn officials would work with the group on updating the town plan.

“Contrary to what a lot of people thought with the demise of the (unincorporated area council) system, the county seems to want local input,” he said, noting that DPER recently assigned a staff person to help the West Hill area update its plan.

Around 20 people attended a recent meeting to discuss the town plan, Johnson said, and this time he hopes they can reach even more islanders than the previous Town Plan Committee did by utilizing technology such as email and Facebook to gather input.

In late 2012, the community council announced that as part of its new bylaws it would use the internet to conduct informal polls and hear comments on issues before board members voted. That effort, however, didn’t go far, as evidenced by a VMICC Facebook page that got little use and just 16 likes after it was created in early 2013.

Johnson, however, said the group hasn’t done much with technology yet because it hasn’t had a substantive issue to take up. He hopes the town plan will revive interest in participating in the council.

“A lot of groups that are civic-minded are finding they’re having a hard time pulling people into meetings,” he said. “This is a great trial and a test ground to see if people will engage in other formats.”

Though the council is early in the process of looking at the town plan, it also needs to move quickly, as large updates to the plan can only be submitted every four years, and the next opportunity is in 2016. Johnson said he expects that the should the group chose to move forward after Monday’s meeting, it would likely start by taking a look at the 2012 proposals.

“They had a lot of meetings for a long time on those,” he said. “We would start by taking the old recommendations and looking at what needs to be cleaned up to make it more current.”

County officials will discuss the Vashon Town Plan at a meeting of the Vashon Maury Island Community Council at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 20, at McMurray Middle School.