Being discovered has its drawbacks and some positives

It was 10 years ago this fall when Whitefish Mayor Andy Feury first noticed how much things were changing.

He was strolling down the road at the time, walking to a local baseball tournament.

Whitefish was a fairly sleepy community at the time, Feury recalled, as was the Flathead Valley itself. There wasn't a lot of development taking place, so pretty much any commercial or residential proposal was met with open arms. Almost anything that created new jobs or tax base was welcome.

"We had no cachet, no national name appeal," Feury said. "Whitefish was still a pretty small 'business.'"

Then, during his walk, he heard a visitor remark to a friend that they'd come to town "looking to buy some dirt."

That was when he realized that Whitefish, and Montana as a whole, was being discovered.

"Suddenly, we were the in-spot to go to," Feury said.

The consequences of this discovery, of becoming the latest hot-spot for the rich and not-so-famous, the latest Western paradise to be marketed and sold around the world, was the subject of a Burton K. Wheeler Center seminar at Grouse Mountain Lodge on Friday.

In addition to Feury, the seminar invited speakers from around the state to discuss the various impacts of the high-end recreational development that's currently taking place in Montana.

Former Gallatin County planning director Dale Beland started out by noting that recreational developments come in a number of forms, from designer golf courses surrounded by homes to ski area condominiums and exclusive, "starter castle" subdivisions.

While it's easy for local residents to focus on the negative aspects and unwelcome changes associated with these projects, Beland said, "we need to accept the fact that, when dealing with something as powerful as national and international market demand, there are going to be both positive and negative impacts."

Some Montana residents, for example, view "being discovered" as something akin to having a swarm of affluent locust descend on the state, gobbling up large tracts of open space, increasing traffic, crowding the trails and ski slopes, and driving up land prices before they move on to the next "in-spot."

Nevertheless, there are other aspects to growth that benefit the entire community.

Feury, for example, said Whitefish has issued $300 million worth of building permits in the last six years, including $85 million last year alone.

Moreover, in the decade since his epiphany, Flathead County has added about $2.25 billion in market value. The valley's entire economy is being driven by a seemingly endless series of new and larger subdivision developments and retail projects.

"About 64 percent of all employment in the valley is in the development field," said Jerry Nix, a former commercial developer and chairman of the county's Long-Range Planning Task Force.

Pat Donovan, one of the partners in the Iron Horse subdivision in Whitefish, said that development has spent more than $80 million on construction - not including the 52 private homes that have been built to date, each of which cost "well over a million dollars."

The private Iron Horse Golf Course has an annual payroll of about $3.5 million, Donovan said, and the subdivision, which currently has about 103 homes and cabins (about a third of the eventual total), paid $2.6 million in property taxes last year.

"We have six school-age children and [privately maintained] roads," he said. "It's very hard for me to believe that Iron Horse isn't paying its own way."

How to balance the economic benefits of these high-end developments - without losing everything that the residents of Montana hold dear about living here - is something that few other "discovered" communities have successfully resolved.

Nevertheless, most speakers at Friday's seminar seemed to think it was possible.

"In Whitefish, we're trying to build a community that people want to make their home," Feury said. "We need to find opportunities for people to become involved in the community, so they see us as a community first, and not just an investment opportunity."

Broad public participation in the planning process was another key requirement cited by several speakers.

Steve Thompson with the National Parks Conservation Association, for example, commended the recent private-public collaboration that helped craft a neighborhood plan for about 13,000 acres of state school trust land surrounding Whitefish.

"It was a unique and unprecedented plan that will help preserve traditional access to some areas while targeting development on other areas," Thompson said.

Land-use consultant Lisa Horowitz also recommended forming partnerships with developers.

"Developers aren't the bad guys," she said. "They're partners in the build-out of the community. There are 740,000 acres of private land in Flathead County. We aren't going to be able to manage it all just using with zoning and subdivision regulations. We have to partner with developers to achieve our community vision."