BRINNON — Developers from The Statesman Group are eyeing late August dates for a Jefferson County hearing that could lead to preliminary plat approval for the Pleasant Harbor Planned Master Resort.

A pause in the pursuit last month led to 22 layoffs of south county construction workers.

“That’s $120,000 a month for the payroll we were paying,” said John Holbert, the former project manager of the development. “That’s a big deal in Brinnon, and now, it’s just not happening.”

Holbert was among those laid off.

Statesman Group CEO Garth Mann said the board had “amended its infrastructure” and that new parties overseeing engineering and project management will be identified if the project receives its required permits.

“We hope these parties are available when we are fully permitted,” he said, referring to the construction workers.

Holbert said the project will bring $300 million in economic growth to the area. In its 19 years on the project, Statesman Group has spent $31 million, he said.

Holbert said the group has paid $750,000 directly to Jefferson County.

He blamed Jefferson County’s Department of Community Development (DCD) for what he called unreasonable delays for a preliminary plat permit and a building permit, both currently in process.

“We were ready to build and we had our construction people here, and they lost their jobs because our board of directors is convinced, if we are going to get a permit, it’s going to be a lengthier process than what we anticipated,” Holbert said before the August dates were being considered.

According to a May 27 Board of Jefferson County Commissioners (BOCC) letter, signed by commissioners Greg Brotherton, Heidi Eisenhour and Heather Dudley-Nollette, the delays are the result of missing information in the permit applications.

The letter gave a timeline of relevant dates in the delayed permitting process.

The Statesman Group submitted its application for the preliminary plat on Nov. 20, 2023, the letter stated. It received a letter of incompleteness for its initial application, Holbert said.

The BOCC’s letter said a revision was submitted on March 25, 2024.

After review, DCD requested further information on last July 3.

DCD narrowed its request, with a reduced number of requirements, on Aug. 16, said Josh Peters, the DCD director who recently was chosen as the next county administrator.

Statesman didn’t provide the requested information until Feb. 4 of this year, Peters said.

“Included in (the Feb. 4 submission) was a redoing of several reports, which I complained very heavily about,” Holbert said. “It added nothing. There were no changes in any of the reports. The contract planner wanted to see fresh reports. The cost of that was $123,000.”

On March 10, the Statesman Group and DCD reached an agreement on a review schedule which would lead to an expedited hearing before Jefferson County’s hearing examiner, according to the BOCC letter.

The hearing was scheduled for May 16.

On March 11, Statesman Group submitted seven changes to the preliminary plat, moving a wastewater treatment plant, roads, a hotel and a spa and a stormwater pond, eliminating lots and moving lot lines and locating a new point of access for the resort, according to the BOCC letter.

Holbert said the developer was responsible for that delay.

In accordance with the development agreement, the developers are supposed to maintain as much forested area as possible, Holbert said. Their preliminary plat had some roads going through wooded areas that didn’t need to be going through the woods. The roads are currently being rerouted by civil engineers, Holbert said.

The work wouldn’t be back until the middle of June, he added.

“There is absolutely no way I can blame the county for that,” Holbert said. “We asked for an expedited process, they were giving that to us, albeit after 15 months of delay. Then, upon further review, we thought there’s a couple of changes that we should make.”

Rescheduling the hearing for late June was initially discussed, Peters said.

At one point, Statesman Group was struggling to find the code-associated changes requested from SCJ Alliance, consultants on the project.

“I couldn’t get answers to where the codes were,” Holbert said. “We couldn’t find the code references that came from SCJ Alliance.”

Eventually, they found the references in the code in Jefferson County, Colo., Holbert said. He added that the episode caused frustration and expense but could not be blamed on the county.

Holbert called Peters his principal antagonist in a May 19 public comment before the BOCC.

“My big complaint was that, for seven months, Mr. Peters would not meet with me,” Holbert said. “He would not meet with me from June of ’24 until February of ’25. I could not get anything from him. He refused to interact.”

As the director of DCD, Peters said it wasn’t his role to be in regular contact with the applicants and that DCD maintained regular contact with the Statesman Group throughout the application process.

The Agra-Centre building

In October 2024, Statesman Group applied for a building permit for a 41,000-square-foot, pre-engineered multipurpose building, according to the BOCC letter.

“Our application that we turned in for the first building — it’s a pretty straightforward building — we turned it in on Oct. 10 of last year, and they left it sitting for about four months,” Holbert said. “The only reason I know that is I know what date the consultant got it.”

Peters said the application didn’t sit for months and that issues were noted by DCD early on.

Peters emailed a list of five dates between Oct. 7 and Nov. 25, 2024, during which requests relating to deficiency in the application were apparently discussed.

In December, DCD sent the application to BHC Consultants, according to the email.

BHC outlined what was missing in a letter to the county, which forwarded it to the developers, Peters said.

Holbert said Statesman Group’s interactions with BHC Consultants were terribly flawed.

“We made that point and the consultant left the project,” Holbert said. “They said all this information wasn’t on the drawings. We showed them where it was on the drawings.”

The key issues cited, Peters said, were the need for a geotechnical soil test for the building site, ingress and egress details, documentation for how the building would meet the energy code, and the need for an occupancy narrative, which could impact the need for a fire suppression system.

“The applicants have had the information since last fall,” Peters said.

Holbert said he did discuss the geotechnical report with Peters.

“They said they needed it, and I pointed it out they had it,” Holbert said. “We didn’t hear anything more about it for a long time.”

“I pointed out that we turned in our geotechnical report with pre-plat,” Holbert said. “We had to do a new pre-plat for SCJ, so they had it. I also told them that the geotechnical report wasn’t going to do them any good because we were building in an area where we had done compaction, it was fill.”

Holbert referred to a site-wide geotechnical report included in the preliminary plat application.

DCD asked for a pad report, Holbert said.

“I said they need to condition the building permit on demonstration of soil-bearing,” Holbert said.

DCD would not provide a conditional permit, Holbert said.

“That’s the normal practice,” he continued. “When you get a building permit, for the most part, you’ve never moved soil. You get a building permit, some foundation engineer says, ‘The soil’s gotta bear this amount of weight.’ You’ve gotta demonstrate that before you pour concrete.”

“Per building code, any time you do something with structural fill, it requires a geotechnical report,” said Jefferson County Building Official Phil Cecere.

Cecere said he was already familiar with the 253-acre site-wide geotechnical report when the requests for a site-specific test were made.

“We talked about where the building site would be,” Cecere said. “I was like, ‘Make sure we have the compaction tests as we go.’ We talked about this from the beginning, when we already had the other site-wide geotechnical report in our possession, that it was going to be required.”

Peters said it’s possible that some of the information that BHC had requested was buried in the document, but the truly essential information was and still is missing.

Holbert has expressed a desire to see the building permitted before conducting a soil test, Peters said. DCD views that order of operations as unorthodox, he added.

Peters said he offered the development group another option: An indemnification agreement allowing the developer to move forward with permitting before completing the soil test.

“So if anything ever went wrong, it wouldn’t be our fault,” Peters said. “If it turns out that you need to retro fit that structure for either egress or fire suppression or any other reason, because later you’re going to have public members enter the structure, then those costs would be borne by you.”

The developers have not taken the indemnification agreement, Peters said.

Holbert said he was unaware of the indemnification agreement offer.

The ingress, egress and fire suppression system requirements weren’t brought to Statesman’s attention until a meeting in late May this year, Holbert said.

Cecere denied that. He pointed to a March 10 BHC review that requested door sizes, door types and hardware types.

Statesman provided comments on the review which said they were unable to provide any information without cited code. Cecere said the comments were provided by Ryan Hodges, who was listed as assistant project manager on the document.

“It’s an entire chapter of the international building code,” Cecere said. “Chapter 10 is all about ingress, egress, egress sizing. It’s pretty basic, standard information.”

Statesman Group commenting that they were unable to answer is not an appropriate answer for someone putting together a multi-million-dollar project, Cecere said.

Though the building doesn’t yet have an occupancy narrative, Holbert said the building’s first use would be as storage, then it would be used to assemble other structures for the site.

A narrative informs which county code DCD needs to look to when ensuring compliance, Peters said. If a structure may move toward having a public use, the requirements would be different, he added.

Any building over 12,000 square feet triggers the need for a fire suppression system, Cecere said.

Moving forward

“We really want to get this done too,” Peters said. “John called me an antagonist in front of the board (of county commissioners) last week. I don’t know what he means. I would really like to get this thing done. We’re as frustrated as they are, I would say.”

In addition to the $750,000 paid to the county, Holbert said the $31 million spent on the project has gone toward purchasing the land, the process of obtaining a development agreement with the county, which required a wildlife management plan, surface and groundwater studies, a geotechnical study, civil engineering, hydrological engineering, two lawsuits and appeal — which the Statesman group won — three environmental impact statements, a traffic study analyzing every intersection from Shelton to Sequim, among other expenses.

“When you’ve got someone who’s trying to spend $300 million on economic development in the county, the county should be working with us,” Holbert said. “There’s no path to a yes with them.”

In the BOCC letter, the commissioners said they want to see the project get done for economic reasons, both for the county and its residents, but that it has to occur within state and county legal frameworks.

“We have a responsibility to be neutral reviewers of code, to compare an application against code,” Peters said. “We can’t move forward without the information on either process.”

Peters named state law, county code and a 1,000-page development agreement as the regulations guiding the DCD’s decisions.

The ball is in the developers’ court, the letter said.

In an email, Mann said Statesman Group is, “Working cohesively with the County to complete the processes for their understanding of the development.”

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Reporter Elijah Sussman can reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.