Planning director on front line of land-use issues

Nearly 20 years into his career as a planner, Mark Mussman realizes how emotional people can become over land use in a place like Flathead County.

“Land-use issues are pretty personal,” said Mussman, director of Flathead County Planning and Zoning Department since 2015.

He said “the fear of the unknown” about a new development can be especially upsetting.

“Whether it’s a small city lot with an old house on it or if it’s 500 acres of farmland … How is this going to affect the investment that I’ve made into probably the single and only big investment I’ve made for my future?” he said. “So yeah, it gets emotional.”

As an example, he pointed out the controversy over the water-bottling plant near Creston, which spurred so much backlash it led a successful ballot initiative to change the zoning regulations where the Montana Artesian Water Company is located. The plant is still able to bottle at a low, non-industrial capacity.

He said opponents of the plant might be in a better place now if they had taken a different approach.

Mussman said sometimes it is better for people to negotiate with developers to try and mitigate the potential impacts of development. If a project meets all the rules and zoning regulations, there is little the Planning and Zoning Department can do to prevent a development from happening.

“Many times … the extra stuff that a developer could do to try and mitigate some of the concerns doesn’t happen because it becomes a huge battle,” Mussman commented. Rarely can a project be stopped, he said, “because these guys [the developers], they read the rules, they read their land-use regulations.”

Mussman said there are a lot of misconceptions about what the Planning and Zoning Department and its staff of nine actually do.

“We don’t really make any decisions here. We administer the land-use regulations, we try and listen to folks and adjust the zoning regulations according to growing trends,” Mussman said.

“You encounter somebody that doesn’t know what we do but knows that we work there … [they] say, ‘How come you guys approved this,’ or, ‘How come you guys approved the water-bottling plant?’” Mussman said.

When he encounters people he has seen at hearings and Planning Board meetings, “they’re surprised that I show my face in public,” he said jokingly.

But he reiterated these decisions do not come from the department, and that the people in the department do not “sit in our office for eight hours with stamps that say approved/denied.”

“It’s the elected officials that make all the decisions,” he said, and his office provides them with the best, most accurate information possible to make those decisions.

Mussman became a planner in 2001 after earning a Master’s of Public Administration degree from Idaho State University.

“I was in the construction trades, doing mostly old house rehab work, and realized that I wasn’t getting any younger … I felt like getting out of the real world and getting into academia,” Mussman said.

But his interests led him into the field of planning, specifically in a government setting. He honed his craft in North Idaho for nearly 10 years before trying out the private sector in 2008-2009.

“I didn’t like the private sector at all,” he said, though he explained work was “a little non-existent” at the time due to the ongoing recession. But re-entering the public sector led him to his next destination: Fairbanks, Alaska.

Mussman spent three winters in Fairbanks – “the real Alaska, none of this Anchorage crap,” he said – with the community planning department.

“It was a really interesting place. Why 100,000 people live there … I have no idea,” he said.

He said Fairbanks was a surprisingly diverse community, and that the people were nicer than anywhere else he has been. But you always had to watch out for moose, even if you were walking downtown.

“It might be 45 below and you slide off the road and you just need the help of the first person that comes along, and you don’t want that to be somebody that you called names and bullied and made fun of. So they keep that to a minimum up there,” he said.

Mussman left Alaska in 2012 and worked in his native Indiana for three years, then had the chance to move to Montana to be the director of a planning department as well as live closer to his children and grandchildren.

He said the challenges in Flathead County are not that much different from the challenges he addressed in Alaska, Indiana or North Idaho.

“You’re dealing with people that choose to live a more rural lifestyle. And so the urban planning strategies and techniques don’t apply,” he said.

But new challenges are arising as the rural Flathead Valley contends with rapid growth and development.

“There’s an ongoing conversation in the valley about affordable workforce housing.” Mussman said. However, the need for more workforce housing contends with people’s resistance to change, especially the alteration of open spaces.

He advised developers “do as much public outreach as possible” with people in the immediate vicinity of a proposed development, even prior to putting together an application.

“It’s easier for a lot of people to interact and express their concerns on a one-on-one basis, and especially on their home turf,” Mussman said, as opposed to getting up at a Planning Board meeting or in front of the county commissioners.

“There’s nothing more emotional than land-use decisions being made next to you or close to you.” But regardless of the type of development, Mussman said, “pretty soon it’s just all going to be part of the landscape that you’re familiar with.”

Reporter Colin Gaiser may be reached at 758-4439 or cgaiser@dailyinterlake.com