Kalispell grows by a square mile

Kalispell is now 11 percent bigger.

On Monday, the city's size was 9.24 square miles. On Tuesday, it was 10.3 square miles.

Another way of looking at it is that Kalispell grew as much in one day as it did in the entire 1990s.

In 1990, the city covered 4.4 square miles. In 2000, it was 5.46 square miles.

However, Kalispell's population is still roughly 20,000 because no one yet lives on the newly annexed land just west of Glacier High School.

On an 8-0 vote Monday, the Kalispell City Council annexed the one-square-mile Starling site, along with three small sites elsewhere. Council Member Kari Gabriel was absent.

Starling's annexation comes with the council's preliminary approval for single-family zoning with modifications to allow 3,000 homes to be built there during the next 20 years.

The land is just west of Glacier High School. It is bound by Stillwater Road on the east, Four Mile Drive on the south, Springcreek Road on the west and West Reserve Drive on the north.

"This is as good a location for the expansion of the city that I can see," council member Bob Hafferman said.

Council member Jim Atkinson said putting 3,000 homes in one square mile will help prevent the city from physically expanding into other areas in the future due to population pressures - leaving open lands untouched elsewhere around Kalispell.

Four people spoke against the annexation and zoning - contending that the site's proposed parks needed to be pinned down more, more traffic details need to be studied, and that zoning for R-2 single-family housing would have been better than the approved R-3 single-family.

West Reserve Drive homeowner Marc Nevas said the developer didn't meet with neighbors to discuss their concerns until after the project appeared likely to get through the Planning Board and City Council.

Opponents also contended that R-3 zoning - which would allow up to seven housing units per acre under a planned unit development agreement also adopted Monday - would give the developer greater leeway to later put in denser housing than it currently proposes. But council members contended the developer could not do so without the city government's permission.

A planned unit development is a contract in which the city relaxes some zoning restrictions in return for the developer's promise to install some mitigating measures.

A partnership of The Aspen Group (a Phoenix-based development firm) and the farming family of Viva Starling Grosswiler, the landowner, sought the annexation.

The Aspen Group is aiming to give Starling an eventual housing density of 4.7 units per acre. R-2 zoning with the adopted modifications would have allowed five units per acre. The adopted R-3 zoning with the approved modifications allows Starling to later seek up to seven units per acre in future phases.

The project expects to build homes in 15 phases over 20 years on the one-square-mile tract of land.

Right now, 54 acres officially are set aside for parks and another 70 to 78 acres are set aside for open land -of which a significant portion will later be converted to parks, City Planner Sean Conrad said.

Conrad said a traffic study has been done on Starling's first phase.

Traffic studies will be done on individual phases or groups of phases as they materialize over the years, city officials said.

The council voted 7-1 Monday to approve preliminary plans for the first phase -putting 236 units, mostly single-family homes, on 63.3 acres. Eight lots will be set aside for houses to be built by Habitat for Humanity.

Hafferman voted against the first phase's preliminary plan, arguing against some dead-end alleys in it.

The overall 20-year project is expected to have some neighborhood shops and parks scattered about in it, along with land set aside for a school.