Board, council to discuss Whitefish growth policy

The Whitefish City-County Planning Board will hold a joint work session with the Whitefish City Council on Thursday to discuss potential revisions to the city’s 2007 growth policy.

The meeting begins at 6 p.m. at Whitefish City Hall, 402 Second St. E.

The growth policy calls for biennial reviews to gauge progress on a number of long-range issues such as changes in community conditions, demographics and economics, and documenting any “unintended consequences” that may be occurring as a result of policies and recommended actions.

A staff report prepared last fall by Planning Director David Taylor noted that many elements of major projects outlined in the growth policy have been completed. The critical areas ordinance, subdivision code rewrite, a citywide transportation plan, rewrite of architectural review standards, extension of services plan and implementation of the downtown master plan all were either completed or overseen by the long-range planning staff and adopted in 2008 and 2009, Taylor said.

Staff reductions in the city Planning Office forced some projects to be put on hold, such as developing “character-based” zoning regulations, major corridor plans, a parks and recreation master plan and work on affordable housing.

Instead, long-range planners were reassigned to state-mandated planning tasks and the day-to-day planning workload of tending to conditional-use permits, lakeshore permits and so on.

The growth policy’s 50 percent infill goal will be revisited as part of the growth policy review. The infill policy is meant to discourage future land-use maps from being amended to allow zoning changes for greater densities until the 50 percent infill goal is reached.

“The policy does not specifically prevent property outside the city from being rezoned to higher densities,” Taylor noted in his report, “and it does allow zoning changes consistent with the underlying future land-use map.”