Owner of resort on Lake Five seeks permits for docks

The owner of a resort on Lake Five has asked for a lakeshore permit to build some docks. Whistlestop Retreat is scheduled to have one lakeshore permit go in front of the Flathead County Planning Board in April, according to county planning director Mark Mussman. In one application, owner Susie Dietz is asking for a permit for a T-shaped docked she already once installed without a permit.

She also is seeking a permit for a swimming platform she previously installed without a permit according to her application.

In addition, she is seeking a boat floating lift station that would attach to the dock. Dietz applied back in October. The application apparently went in front of county commissioners but they, in turn, sent it to the planning board for

review. The resort is also seeking a second permit “to put back in the historical dock near the artists’s studio.”

A hearing for the second permit has been set yet.

The resort was once a summer home to author James Webster Sherwood III, one of the heirs to General Mills, the makers of cereals like Trix and Cheerios.

The county previously OK’d a major expansion of the resort property, only to be rebuffed in Flathead County District Court after Friends of Lake Five, a nonprofit group that objected to the expansion, sued. Dietz had already started expanding the resort before getting the necessary permits.

Friends of Lake Five won the suit and the county rescinded the resort’s permits. Dietz has publicly complained about the permit process

in letters to the editor to the Hungry Horse News. “The commissioners denied me a dock permit for a property that has never had a dock nor in any violation, all because of loud anger from misled neighbors and an organization that is suing the county commissioners. This should be an outrage for other private property land owners. The commissioners now insist that taxpayers pay for a public hearing,” she claimed in a letter earlier this year.