Neighborhood planning in jeopardy

North Forkers who have been told by the Flathead County Planning Office that they need to update their neighborhood plans may not be alone.

Middle Canyon residents learned Sept. 2 that the planning office had advised petitioners seeking higher density zoning outside West Glacier that their neighborhood plan is also in need of a timely review.

And neighborhoods across the county may find their plans rolled up into a countywide growth policy - the document mandated by the Montana Legislature to replace county master plans.

Depending on how you count them, there are 12 "neighborhood plans" in Flathead County. They range in size from Bigfork and Lakeside - which are essentially towns that haven't taken the extra step of incorporating - to small neighborhoods within or near city limits, including Talbott, in Columbia Falls, and South Woodland/Greenacres, just outside Kalispell.

This list includes rural areas with a lot of potential activity and conflicts - such as the North Fork and the middle and upper Canyon zoning districts - and rural areas where growth is not ready to take place - such as the LaBrant/Lindsey area at the foot of the Swan Range, north of Bigfork.

It also includes lakeshore communities who created plans to protect water quality as well as their neighborhoods - Little Bitterroot Lake, Ashley Lake and Rogers Lake - as well as former farmland like West Valley, which sits right on the edge of phenomenal residential growth at Kalispell's northern limits.

Even the state has an interest in neighborhood planning - the 640-acre school trust section on U.S. Highway 93, where a new Loews Home Improvement Center is under construction, is governed by a five-year old plan that operates like a neighborhood plan.

Plans are not put up to a vote. Zoning can be defeated if 40 percent of the landowners, or 50 percent counted by agricultural or forest acreage, vote against the proposal during the 30-day protest period.

Area property owners defeated neighborhood zoning three times in Flathead County - for the Lower Canyon, including Hungry Horse, Martin City and Coram; the lakeshore community of Somers; and land surrounding Glacier Park International Airport.

Two new neighborhood plans are in the works. The state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation is developing a neighborhood plan for school trust lands near Whitefish, and residents in the Helena Flats area have been putting together a plan to protect their neighborhood.

Planners who were involved in creating many of these neighborhood plans say the plans could be easily rolled into a new countywide growth plan without asking local residents to go through the lengthy and expensive process of rewriting their plan.

Helena Flats residents learned that spending their own money and time holding meetings and gathering information on land-use concerns is not enough - the county planning office wanted them to pay a $1,500 flat fee and $10 an acre to put the plan in place. The county commissioners opted to cap the fee at $10,000 - a fee many local groups still might find excessive - and it's unclear if that fee will apply to neighborhood plans already in place.

Rapid growth across the county has many residents concerned. Zoning change requests come before the county planning board and the commissioners on a routine basis - and most of the county is unzoned. Longtime and new landowners alike appeal to the county on the basis of property rights and fairness, but the bottom line is turning land into quick money.

Recently a dozen landowners who had petitioned for a zoning change at the gateway to Glacier National Park learned to their dismay that zoning regulations limited minimum lot sizes for commercial properties to 10 acres or 6,000 square feet - not five acres or anything in between. Those numbers are not arbitrary. The residents who drafted the Canyon Plan in 1994 chose those numbers for a reason - to prevent commercial sprawl.

Likewise, regulations governing the size of docks in Flathead Lake are not arbitrary. A proposal to exceed the 100-foot dock length rule by 400 feet for a new 196-slip marina in Lakeside is probably what county residents and planners had in mind when they drafted lakeshore regulations in the first place for Flathead Lake.

Residents should be concerned about the slippery slope and gradual erosion of neighborhood plans and zoning. If the county approves five-acre commercial density at the entrance to Glacier National Park, how will they stop one-acre in the future? And if a giant new marina is approved in Lakeside, what will the county tell the backers of the next proposal somewhere else?

United, the county's 12 neighborhoods could exert a powerful influence on the county planning board and commissioners. At the least, affected residents should pay attention to the county growth policy currently under development to see how it might change the look and feel of their neighborhoods.