Council incumbent addresses the issues

Frank Sweeney is the only incumbent among this year's four Whitefish City Council candidates. He was appointed to the council after Shirley Jacobson resigned.

Sweeney has served in a number of community functions, from being a telemark-skiing Ambassador on Big Mountain to serving on the boards of the Glacier Institute and Foys To Blacktail Trail projects and on the advisory committee for the A Trail Runs Through It project. He also served on the Whitefish City-County Planning Board, including about one year as chairman.

Sweeney and his wife Paula moved to Whitefish from Texas in 1998. Both are attorneys. Sweeney said they spent about 20 years looking for a home in the mountains away from a metropolitan environment.

"We even looked at Anchorage, Alaska, but it wasn't horse country," he said.

Whitefish fit the bill, and their decision to settle here parallels Sweeney's decision to run for city council.

"The bottom line is that we moved here because we wanted to be part of the community, part of what Whitefish is, more than any other place we've lived," he said. "The kinds of people living here are the kinds of people we like — this is not a high-end resort but a functioning community."

Several issues, however, are testing the Whitefish community — most recently the streetscaping proposal that will accompany reconstruction of the city's downtown streets and infrastructure.

Sweeney said the streetscaping design was properly vetted, "but unfortunately public process isn't swift — it takes time and it takes participation."

"The city isn't jamming this down the people's throat," he said. "It's not a city plan."

Sweeney said the city turned to consultants to help with the downtown design, consultants who say Whitefish must become more pedestrian-friendly to maintain its downtown retail vitality. And streetscaping amounts to about 1 percent of the project's total cost, he pointed out.

"We wouldn't be doing it if we didn't believe it will work," he said, adding that "the infrastructure has deteriorated and needs to be replaced — that's what's driving the work."

Sweeney said the Central Avenue sidewalk mock-up demonstrated a traffic problem that already existed.

"We move slowly downtown, and we will continue to do that," he said. "Big pickups will continue to pose the same problem."

As for downtown's historical character, Sweeney said it's the businesses we use, the people there, the buildings' facades and the building heights that determine the character — not the roadway.

Sweeney served on the advisory committee that helped draft the city's controversial Critical Areas Ordinance (CAO), which he said is "all about protecting water quality."

"Is it the end-all? No, other water quality issues exist," he said.

The ordinance went "far enough" to accomplish that goal, he said, but along the way it became more complicated as it addressed issues raised by developers who were concerned about property rights. Later amendments, nicknamed "CAO Lite," were a good improvement, he said.

"The intent of the Critical Areas Ordinance is not to slow growth," Sweeney said. "If that was the goal, there are other ways to do that."

Sweeney said he supports the city's jurisdiction over the two-mile planning and zoning area, the so-called "doughnut." The city's interests are protecting water quality, transportation corridors and land that will one day be annexed into the city. But "the kicker is that Whitefish is bigger than its city limits," he said.

"Most of the people in the doughnut consider themselves Whitefish people, and they're proud of that," he said.

The challenge is finding a way to provide doughnut residents with a voice in city government, which is on the city council's goal list. He readily concedes, however, that the issue is moot if the city doesn't prevail in its lawsuit against the county and retains its jurisdiction.