Whitefish struggling with drop in projects

Among Flathead County’s three incorporated cities, Whitefish has faced the biggest cutbacks in the planning arena.

When Whitefish Planning Director David Taylor was hired in 2007, the city had six full-time employees in the Planning Office. Now it’s just him and a senior planner. A secretary in the Building Department answers the phone and transfers calls to the Planning Office.

That means Taylor and his co-worker are handling all of the inquiries and processing of applications.

“And we’re doing the filing and licking envelopes,” Taylor said. “We’re swamped.”

But as long as planning-fee revenue remains at low levels, the staff won’t get any bigger.

“Planning fees are down because we’re not seeing the big subdivisions and that’s where the money is at,” he said.

Whitefish planning-fee revenue topped out at $254,281 in fiscal year 2007, when fee revenue was up 287 percent from the previous year.

By fiscal year 2008 that revenue had dropped 58 percent, to $106,488. In fiscal 2009 it fell to $91,542, then plummeted another 67 percent to just $29,897 in fiscal 2010.

So far this fiscal year, fee revenue in Whitefish is about $10,000 ahead of budget projections, a good sign for the resort town. The city expects to bring in about $45,000 in fee revenue for the fiscal year ending next June.

Whitefish has seen an uptick in building permits, too. Taylor said in September and October this year, the city issued more building permits than in the same months in 2008 and 2009 combined.

Kalispell’s Planning Office has had fewer staff cutbacks. Two years ago a planner and a code enforcement officer were laid off, but since then things have stabilized, Planning Director Tom Jentz said.

The office currently has three planners including Jentz, a Geographic Information System coordinator and a part-time administrative assistant.

“We’re stable and functioning,” Jentz said.

Although the permit application load is light these days, the planning staff is busy updating subdivision regulations, just finished updating zoning regulations and is ready to embark on a city growth-policy update.

“We’ve picked up other duties, too,” Jentz said. “We’re trying to get away from a department that lives and dies by fee revenue. We’ve tried to structure the department to weather the quiet times.”

Weed and code enforcement and administering a brownfields grant for the city are additional tasks planners are handling to fill in the gaps.

The city of Kalispell has had bigger development projects to handle than either of the county’s other incorporated cities.

Expansion of Kalispell Regional Medical Center and Immanuel Lutheran Home are among the bigger tasks keeping planners busy. The shift of some businesses such as Sleep City and Walmart from Evergreen to Kalispell have padded the Planning Office’s workload, too.

Jentz has been a planner in the Flathead for 27 years, enough time to see several cycles of growth and economic downturns.

“It was quiet in the ’80s; 1984 to 1988 were very quiet,” Jentz recalled. “We’ve always cycled and we’ve been fortunate to miss other national recessions.”

Kalispell’s growth spurt topped out in fiscal 2007 when the city collected a record $411,000 in planning fees.

Last year collections had dwindled to $63,000. The city budgeted for $65,000 in planning-fee revenue for this fiscal year, but with only $9,645 collected so far, the city may not meet its projection.

In Columbia Falls, City Manager Bill Shaw handles the entire planning workload, which isn’t much these days, he said.

“It hasn’t been difficult keeping up,” he said.

During the height of the building boom five years ago, the city of Columbia Falls contracted with land-use planner Lisa Horowitz for about a year and had an administrative secretary for about 18 months.

When Shaw began work as manager in 2001, the Columbia Falls Planning Board was meeting sporadically because there were so few applications. That’s the case now, too, he said. At a minimum the board meets quarterly because it’s mandated to do so.

Planning-fee revenue doesn’t pad the Columbia Falls budget.

Shaw projected $6,000 in fee revenue this fiscal year. In 2005-06, it averaged roughly $45,000 to $50,000 a year in fee revenue.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com