Look at both big, little picture

Inter Lake editorial

It's a conundrum in Flathead County planning: Should planning be done from the top down or from the bottom up?

Resolving that question may determine the success - or lack thereof - of planning in this valley.

At the core of the dilemma is the sometimes-conflicting nature of two ways of approaching planning. Neighborhood plans, on the one hand, give people in a community or neighborhood the chance to decide for themselves what land uses make sense in their particular area.

However, critics say that method neglects the overall picture. They say regional planning is needed to benefit the entire county, not just islands here and there where people have banded together to keep things as they are.

In the early 1990s there was a major surge in neighborhood plans for areas ranging from the West Valley to West Glacier. Today there are signs of a resurgence in neighbors working to create new plans.

Some people (including the county planning director) welcome that. Others (including members of the Planning Board) worry that piecemeal neighborhood plans will interfere with adequate planning for the valley as a whole.

The challenge, in a rapidly growing county, is to accommodate the demands for commercial and industrial space, gravel pits, higher-density developments, affordable housing and other possibly unpopular land uses that may not be welcomed in everyone's back yard.

The trouble is, if you let each neighborhood ban "undesirable" but necessary development from its own backyard, then eventually there will be no place for such development to go. That may be good for the neighborhood, but there are also consequences that are not necessarily in the best long-term interests of the county as a whole.

Gravel pits are one particularly contentious example of this. They have to go somewhere, even though no one wants them next door.

Other issues of property development are also relevant. Some large agricultural landowners, for example, are looking for options to manage their farms and provide for retirement; they're concerned that if the neighbors have a say, those options could be unreasonably curtailed.

Rural homeowners, on the other hand, don't want their treasured lifestyles sacrificed to maximize someone's profit. By working together, they hope to preserve the open space, wildlife habitat and other qualities that define its character, yet still allow some development.

The county's brand-new growth policy is a broad document that is not site-specific and doesn't provide a lot of planning direction for individual land-use decisions.

That's where neighborhood plans might come in to provide some basic level of planning.

Overall, the solution may be for the varied planning spectrums to meet somewhere in the middle. Neighborhood plans are fine, but they need to conform with regional planning, too, or the Flathead may become a patchwork of isolationist pockets.

But neighborhood plans need to be somewhat flexible, too, and updated frequently (West Valley's neighborhood plan, for example, managed to stave off commercial development but didn't anticipate the recent surge in gravel-pit activity prompted by declining agricultural revenue).