Saving the oasis - one island at a time

'Creating the neighborhood plan was a positive thing for most of us. Rather than have our area melded into some huge countywide thing, it gave us a voice.' n Fred Hodgeboom

Most were inspired by fear.

That stack of 10 neighborhood plans adopted here about a decade ago? Think of them as dikes holding back the floodwaters. Think of them as Great Walls designed to keep the invading hordes at bay.

Most were attempts to avoid unwanted change.

Sometimes proactive, sometimes reactive, they were communal efforts to prevent things from being altered beyond recognition as the population grew and traffic multiplied and new homes encroached on what used to be an untrammeled paradise.

Fundamentally, they were responses to the unwelcome possibilities that crowded the horizon.

In the West Valley, the wall started going up in 1995, after someone proposed building a convenience store next to the elementary school.

"That was the catalyst," said Kim Davis, a former Flathead County Planning Board member who has lived in the area for almost 20 years. "The community was pretty split on the issue. Some people felt it would set a precedent for commercial growth in the area. At about that same time, [county planner] Tom Jentz was talking about neighborhood plans. They were a relatively new idea here; people thought maybe we should consider doing one."

The county hired a private consultant to help West Valley residents develop a plan. After 23 meetings and more than a year of effort, the proposal went to the commissioners for their consideration.

News reports at the time indicate that 155 property owners protested the final document, which included zoning provisions. However, that was far short of the 40 percent or 530 owners needed to block approval, so the plan was formally adopted in April 1997.

"We had a lot of good participation and compromise," recalled Davis, who attended almost all of the West Valley meetings. "It was an attempt by the people who lived here to maintain the character of the area. We weren't looking for it to change - most of us moved here for what it was. I think it worked out very well. We still don't have any large retail development, so it has worked."

Similar concerns on the residential side prompted other communities to bring forward their own plans.

Despite the months of effort and seemingly endless meetings required, the landowners who helped create these documents typically have positive memories of the experience.

Judy Larson, for example, chaired the West Valley steering committee. She said crafting that plan took a huge time commitment, but people were able to work through their differences.

"We started out talking about what was most important to us and what we could to compromise on," she said. "There was a lot of give-and-take. People were willing to look at each issue from the other person's point of view. The word 'litigation' never came up."

Phil Crissman described his involvement with the LaBrant-Lindsey Lane plan as "the purest form of democracy I've ever been involved with."

"At our first meeting, at least half the audience was suspicious - they didn't want anything to do with planning," Crissman recalled during a round-table discussion sponsored by the Flathead Neighborhood Network last year. "By the time we were done, 89 percent of the landowners approved the plan."

Fred Hodgeboom, who also worked on the LaBrant plan, said the whole idea was "to get neighbors together and try to reach agreement on what the area ought to look like in the future."

"What prompted it was a dense subdivision project on about 160 acres," Hodgeboom said. "It proposed one- to five-acre lots, which most people thought was inconsistent. Creating the neighborhood plan was a positive thing for most of us. Rather than have our area melded into some huge countywide thing, it gave us a voice."

Even if the plans do good things for some local landowners, though, it's unclear how beneficial they are for the valley as a whole.

Except for Lakeside, Bigfork and some parts of the Canyon, for example, none of the neighborhood plans created here in the mid-'90s propose housing densities greater than one home per five acres. Several recommend 10-acre densities; LaBrant-Lindsey Lane recommends 20 acres.

Similarly, most of the plans discourage commercial development. West Valley ultimately allowed convenience stores as a conditional use - but only if two pages of regulations are satisfied, which may explain why a store was never built.

Bigfork, Lakeside and the Canyon support limited commercial activity, primarily within established business areas and corridors.

While there may be perfectly valid reasons why commercial or higher-density residential development is inappropriate for certain neighborhoods, the broader public interest requires that these activities be allowed somewhere, even if local residents don't approve. And placing a blanket prohibition or restriction on them in an area that's 24 times the size of Kalispell - the combined extent of all the existing neighborhood plans - may not be the best way to decide which locations are best suited for certain land uses.

Over the last 18 months, the Flathead County Planning Board had numerous discussions on this issue.

The board members have extremely diverse opinions about neighborhood plans in general.

Several, however, consider the insular nature of the documents

to be a fundamental weakness: Rather than accommodate a growing county's needs for commercial and industrial space,

gravel pits, higher-density residential developments, affordable housing and other unsightly or unpopular land uses, the plans cater to the desires of a limited number of residents - most of whom don't want anything to do with regional growth, preferring instead to minimize the changes affecting their community.

"I think neighborhood plans are a good concept, but they tend to be exclusionary. People do them because they don't want certain things," said Jeff Larsen, who served on the Planning Board for seven years. "But we also need certain things. We need gravel, we need mobile home parks, a place for people to get started. My fear is that if everything is done through neighborhood planning, we aren't going to have a comprehensive [regional] plan that addresses all our needs. The planning board has to promote the general welfare; it's tough to do that if we don't have an overall plan."

Gene Dziza, the current board president, questioned whether a renewed emphasis on local planning - which the Planning Office seems to support - will improve the valley's ability to manage growth or simply contribute to the Balkanization of the Flathead.

"I'd hate to see us break the county up into a lot of little blocks," Dziza said. "All of these microcosms could end up becoming impediments to cohesive, consistent countywide planning. It's hard to pursue common goals and objectives if we're planning around smaller jurisdictions that may have different goals and objectives. We'll have a growth policy that says, 'Here are the [land use] policies for the Flathead, except for here, and here and here …'"

Kathy Robertson, one of the Planning Board's strongest advocates of neighborhood plans, said local planning should fit with the valley's broader, regional land-use goals.

"There's too much diversity in the valley to try and address everything in the growth policy," she said. "What works for Bigfork isn't going to work for Marion. And the people living in an area should have some say about how it develops. They know more than we do about what constraints or environmental issues are present.

"But it can't be done in isolation. Transportation, water quality, sewage treatment - those are countywide issues. I think it's the planning board's responsibility to coordinate the different neighborhood plans and help blend them in with the overall county picture."

In hindsight, it's easy to criticize the planning efforts that took place here in the mid-1990s for ignoring this bigger picture - for failing, as an example, to clearly designate an appropriate commercial or high-density residential reserve to offset what amounts to the 120,000-acre exclusion zone established in the various neighborhood plans.

At the time, though, "big picture" planning was experiencing tremendous turmoil. Neighborhood plans may have been the only realistic alternative to no planning at all.

"Not everybody liked them, but they were better than nothing," said Kalispell Planning Director Tom Jentz, who was a county planner in the early to mid-'90s and later director of countywide planning.

In 1992, a diverse group of more than two dozen local organizations - ranging from real estate and construction industry associations to Big Mountain, the Flathead Basin Commission and various environmental groups - came together to update the 1987 master plan and county zoning regulations.

Dubbed the Cooperative Planning Coalition, the group conducted an extraordinary fund-raising campaign, collecting more than $600,000 and hiring a private consulting firm to help create the plan.

The commissioners approved the update in 1994, despite threats of a recall and increasingly boisterous opposition. They rescinded the decision two years later, however, following a 1996 advisory vote in which plan foes outnumbered proponents 8,396 to 6,592.

"There was an attempt to do countywide planning and it failed," Jentz said. "So the planning office consciously moved ahead with neighborhood plans. Trying to harness the entire county into one plan was difficult, so the idea was to proceed neighborhood by neighborhood, in areas where the landowners wanted to work together."

Maybe that's their only true flaw.

Designed to protect communities from outside forces - from the people moving into the valley, and the traffic and homes and changes that they bring - the neighborhood plans created here in the 1990s were premised on the idea that saving the oasis can be done one island at a time.

Rather than endure the give-and-take necessary to create a valleywide vision for the future, rather than work through their differences, people accepted a planning approach that split the Flathead into small, isolated preserves that were surrounded by relatively unrestricted development zones. It left the county as a whole reacting to growth, rather than managing it.

"Our plan was to maintain the character of the West Valley the way it was and let Kalispell grow where it was at," recalled Kim Davis. "That seemed like the best approach at the time, because the agricultural community was doing well. But we all know now that's not going to work."

As the Planning Office moves forward with implementing the new growth policy, it's facing many of the same choices and dilemmas that county planners confronted in the '90s. It remains to be seen whether the planning staff, elected officials and the community itself will demand a more comprehensive solution.

Reporter Bill Spence may be reached at 758-4459 or by e-mail at bspence@dailyinterlake.com