SEQUIM – The Sequim City Council will discuss whether to reconsider their vote to deny a plan to build a 217-unit manufactured home development.

City Manager Charlie Bush announced Tuesday that the developer, JWJ Group, has submitted a Request To Reconsider to the city.

“The item will be on the agenda for the 13th of January for the council to consider whether or not they want to reconsider their decision and we’re still working through a lot of the mechanisms for doing that. It’s been a long time since the city’s been through a process like this. So we don’t have all that information detail yet, but we’ll certainly have it well before the 13th”

The December 9 denial of the group’s Lavender Meadows project on 38 acres along Sequim-Dungeness Way was based on a 3-3 tie, with one councilmember abstaining from the vote.

Bush would not speculate on whether the company’s Request To Reconsider was meant to avoid a possible lawsuit but, in the document, the group’s attorney writes “The Petitioner is experiencing significant and ongoing monetary damages that are directly and proximately caused by the Council’s arbitrary, capricious and unlawful Decision.”

The document goes on to say “ The only apparent basis for the Council’s Decision is its conclusory and unsupported finding that the Project “does not serve the public interest.””

Councilmember Ted Miller, one of the dissenting voters, takes issue with that.

“That is not at all the basis in which the vote was made. The vote was made entirely on whether the 2007 ordinance took precedence over the 1997 ordinance which requires a public road versus private roads in the development and I’m not sure whether they simply misconstrued what the basis of the vote was. But the policy of the city council was that there would be no more private roads except in gated communities and that should have applied to this as well.”

Along with Miller, the other “no” votes were William Armacost and Bandon Janisse. Voting in favor were Mayor Dennis Miller, Candace Pratt and Bob Lake. Jennifer States abstained because she had missed an earlier presentation by the developer to the council.

It’s difficult to predict an outcome should the council elect to take a revote because two of the current councilmembers, Pratt and Lake, will be replaced by freshman councilmembers Troy Tenneson and Tom Ferrell by the January 13 meeting.