Guest opinion

Planning failure: A Flathead case study

This is the conclusion of an article from last week's Bigfork Eagle written by the former planning director of the Flathead Regional Development Office.

Collapse

In the last several months I have been reading "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, author of "Guns, Germs and Steel."

In his latest book, in his analysis of failed societies and economically unjustifiable land use schemes, he devotes large sections of the book to Montana—the Bitterroot Valley and the Zortman Landusky mine in particular.

In his analysis he develops five themes that he views as contributing to societal collapse.

One of these themes that I find most troublesome—and appropriate to the Flathead—is modification of the natural environment by increasing population densities dependent upon transient weather or resource availability conditions.

Specifically, the concern is the shift from agriculture and open space to low-density rural residential development. These low-density developments are especially dependent on petroleum based, private transportation networks that are of deep concern for the future.

Physically the Flathead Valley, to paraphrase one of the valley's notable professors, is similar to a large stone bathtub filled up with gravel. Water comes in from the north from Glacier Park, the Bob Marshall and Great Bear Wildernesses. It drains to the south and exits from 'the tub' at Polson in Lake County.

The valley's communities are mostly perched on those gravel aquifers, and flush either treated or untreated sewer and septic discharge into the water flowing through the system.

I use the term "community" in the broadest sense, in that as the valley has grown, the limits of the town borders have become blurred. Thousands of rural residents live (mostly on septic systems), work, shop and recreate over the whole of the valley floor as well as spilling out all the way to the Bitterroot Valley to the south.

In many areas, it is only the volume of water moving through the aquifer system that keeps the septic discharge from fouling water for domestic use.

While doing some Internet reading, I found the May 10, 2005, edition of the High Country News and came across articles written by ranchette dwellers praising and justifying their life style choices.

Both of the writers were from Montana, one around Bozeman and the other south of Missoula. Both were very articulate in expressing their experience of what the geographer Yi Fu Tuan called topophilia, or the attachment we humans have to a physical place and our positive emotional relationship to it.

We love the place that becomes our home, but at times our need to be occupying that special place outstrips the carrying capacity of the environment.

Valley lost or vision for the future?

In January of 1986 I replaced Nick Verma as the planning director in the Flathead Regional Development Office. In my opinion, one of the reasons that he left the job was the inability to reconcile his vision for the valley with that of the elected officials from the municipalities.

Rightly or wrongly, he had a vision of the valley floor built out, with ever-expanding urban residential density and dispersed commercial centers servicing this population. He wanted this. This led him to support the moving of Flathead Valley Community College out of Kalispell, the relocation of the post office out of the downtown, and other land use conversions hotly debated by the city fathers.

During the late 1980s, the voices of conservation and supporters of planning had encouraged the development of neighborhood planning districts and the implementation of rural zoning districts outside of the city/county planning jurisdictions.

Land use changes, "to protect the property rights of the owners," were cropping up just ahead of the planning and regulatory efforts. This cascading effect led to the proposal for Interim County Wide Zoning, so the valley would suspend development while the planning was to be done. Sound familiar?

The opposition to planning and interim zoning joined the opposition developing against the county's adoption of a building-code-based permit system for residential construction.

Initially, support for the permit system was galvanized due to the relocation and occupation of condemned houses from the incorporated cities in rural areas where there were no code restrictions.

Ellen Perlman described this Flathead Valley opposition as part of a national trend in Governing magazine in an article titled "Property Rights: A Revolt Under Construction" (October 1995).

By early 1992, opposition had grown to the point where confrontation between the warring factions appeared inevitable, and a referendum vote on the interim zoning was scheduled. Collectively we chose an alternative path.

Cooperative planning

When faced with a potential for a media battle between the supporters and opponents of planning, members of the county planning board and I met with representatives of the building trades, real estate profession and the vocal opponents of regulation to propose a different approach.

Rather than waste our collective resources on media coverage for the various positions, I proposed that we approach the problem by creating a community-based citizens' group to write a plan for the future and recommend regulations to implement it.

This was a non-traditional approach and it took a lot of trust on the part of the planning board to commit to allow a citizen committee to be in the driver's seat.

The planning board was represented in the Cooperative Planning Coalition (CPC), but the coalition had control of the process. Together they raised half a million dollars, mostly from local landowners and businesses, and with county concurrence CPC hired a professional planning team, Aspen-based Design Workshop, to work with them to write the county plan.

For the next two years the CPC worked to build local consensus, ultimately holding more than 200 public meetings.

The plan that evolved ranged from encouraging protection of agricultural lands and open space, to recommending that approval of large subdivisions be contingent upon meeting set performance standards, including impact fees based upon anticipated community costs from the developments.

These were "store-brand vanilla" recommendations and are broadly accepted standards nationally. Nothing proposed was unusual or represented grievous takings of property rights.

At the end of the formal planning process the draft plan contained approximately 80 pages and was taken to a series of neighborhood meetings for review and comment.

Opponents to planning came out in force at these meetings. The gloves were off. In reflecting on that time it is clear to me that the extreme negative voices of the polemic had come to dominate the public forum. I had good friends of planning tell me frankly that, "We like what you are doing but we will never come to a public meeting and accept verbal abuse like that again."

Seeds of failure

In a political environment where officials were elected on anti-planning and anti-regulation platforms, the future was not bright for the CPC planning effort.

The local talk radio had a daily program providing opportunity for citizens to "speak out."

The content, with virulent invective against planning and any kind of regulation, was the source of more than one physical threat against the planning staff and board members.

By the end of the process, the CPC plan had been stripped down to a limp 17-page version of its former self, even that was ultimately rejected by the County Commissioners and shelved.

This, in my opinion, continues to set the tone for a future that will haunt the valley. The false comfort for officials—who act out the myth that they are responding to the voice of the people when that voice is just loudest, most long lasting and or most abrasive—will be short lived.

The Flathead Valley has been facing (or ignoring) the challenge of choosing their future reality for the last 10 years. Valley residents need to realize that failure to plan is a choice in itself and will have dramatic environmental and tax consequences over time.

For the last 10 years I have been working in emerging democracies in central Europe, Asia and now Africa. The view from outside looking back has highlighted the precarious nature of the land use pattern and rural dispersed lifestyle so glorified in the United States and the American West in particular.

The underlying reality is that as a nation we continue to relocate our population, especially retirees, to some of the most potentially inhospitable portions of our landscape—the mountains and desert.

We are committing to long term development patterns that have massive energy and water demands for the continued viability of these places as usable habitat. The Flathead Valley is a poster child in this trend.

I may be just adding my voice to the din that is already being successfully ignored by mainstream America, but just because these communities think that they deserve to be subsidized at the peak of the world-wide resource consumption chain does not make it so.

In the last month I have made two trips into the Niger River Delta of Nigeria (currently the source of 17 percent of U.S. domestic imports] to participate in meetings with citizens and officials whose decisions directly affect the price Americans pay at the pump while fueling inefficient vehicles.

Believe me, there is no concern given to the thought of your continuing to be able to drive your Hummer over to Eagle Bend on cheap gas.

Another book, The Geography of Nowhere, in reporting the voices of citizens facing the demise of their vanishing small town, has highlighted very neatly our tendency to believe that our perceptions of reality are permanent and that things "will always be this way". Denial of change is the easy route. The acceptance of change is fundamentally difficult, particularly if the change demanded impacts our perceived rights.

Choices to make

If you, through your elected officials, can not decide to regulate or stop growth on the valley floor, then start planning the infrastructure needed to occupy that space with out poisoning your water and that of those down stream. I will not even pause to explore the potential impacts of your land use decisions on the Native American populations down the watershed from you. Now is the time to start planning and implementing a transportation network to move the population when the fuel runs out or gets so expensive that only the mega-rich will be using private transportation. Get the sewer systems in now. Water quality regulations will never be less burdensome than they are now, and external public scrutiny on Montana will only increase as down-stream water demands increase.

Hope for the future

You have the ideas and resources necessary to do this job. Because of where you live you have the attention of every conservation and resource management organization in the country. One of the benefits of living in the Rocky Mountain West is the integrated relationship of public and privately-owned lands and the resource values these lands provide for the residents. While serving as Planning Director, I was able to attend a seminar sponsored by several of the public land management agencies for their professional staff to address the issue of implementing public policy in the face of community opposition. The core concepts of this methodology, which I am sharing below, provided the underlying rationale for my support for the CPC approach to planning.

The Institute for Participatory Management and Planning established by, Doctors Hans and Annemarie Bleiker came to the Flathead in the early 1990's to present a methodology that has been dramatically effective in mobilizing community support for difficult-to implement public policy decisions and natural resource management issues.

I would strongly recommend the concepts to any citizens' group or elected officials that have the responsibility for implementing policy in conditions of opposition or mixed community support.

The first concept is that in many cases, you can never reach uniform agreement, on all or even most issues. What is possible to achieve is a condition of informed consent among those affected by an action. Based upon that informed consent individuals can and will accept actions chosen even if it goes against their perceived short-term self interest. The conditions under which this can occur (the 'Bleiker Life Preserver') are:

All affected parties must accept that fact that the decisions to be made are important to their long term interest. There really IS a serious problem . . . or opportunity . . . one that just HAS to be addressed.

You (or your organization) are the right entity to address it . . . In fact, given your mission, it would be IRRESPONSIBLE if you didn't.

The way you are going about it . . . i.e. the way you are tackling the problem . . . is REASONABLE, . . . SENSIBLE, . . . RESPONSIBLE.

You ARE listening; you DO care . . . If, what you are proposing is going to HURT someone, it's NOT because you're not listening; it's NOT because you don't care . . .

The purpose is that those making the decision are providing a legitimate opportunity for those affected to participate in the process and affect the outcome.

Second is that of development of a broad-based community understanding that what is being proposed is indeed a reasonable, sensible and responsible approach to dealing with the future of land use planning and regulation. Here again, in the CPC process, the anti- regulatory stakeholders were not successfully brought on board. I believe that their opposition was based upon dramatically exaggerated fears of the intent and purpose of the planning process. Given the extreme nature of the rumors said to underlie the planning effort, I do not know if the bland truth would have carried the argument for support.

A third area, one that I still debate internally, is the issue of legitimacy. Is/was the Cooperative Planning Coalition the proper vehicle for making the effort to draft and propose the plan? I would argue that at the time, given the fractious nature of the Valley, the combined efforts of the planning board, the real estate profession, citizen volunteers and technical staff was the alternative of choice. The problem was failing to convince planning opponents that the CPC effort was a viable and responsible alternative to unregulated development.

Analysis of failure

In looking at the planning failure of the mid-nineties there are lessons to be learned. First and foremost is that all stakeholders must agree that there is an important issue that needs to be addressed. As long as there is a segment of the population that does not agree that there is a need to act for the greater common good, you will probably never achieve informed consent.

In the process of negotiation for settlement of conflict or grievance issues, if one or more of the parties of the process has no 'buy in' to the perceived long-term result , or has a predetermined commitment to having the process fail, legitimate settlement can not be achieved. In governance issues in particular, if that unconvinced constituency has political clout, even well-intentioned and funded efforts are doomed to fail. The CPC effort suffered this fate.

While writing about this planning issue, our copy of the internationally recognized restaurateur George Lang's autobiography came. In it he wisely states that there is more to learn from failure than success, because the circumstances are more interesting and instructive. I appreciated his candor observing that looking critically at our failures helps us avoid repeating them and sets a part of the framework for future success. I hope that this is possible in western Montana, a place my now-grown children have chosen to live, and that I still have great affection toward.

The way forward

Twenty years ago if there had been a conscious decision for the valley to be built out with minimal controls it would look a lot like it does now. Are the majority of the citizens happy with the result? Without planning the next twenty years will be more of the same or worse.

To begin to address the future you do not need to look far from home. The last Flathead Study Commission report from the late 1980's has an excellent set of recommendations for the future. The initial draft of the CPC plan is another resource already heavily invested in. Citizen volunteers on the county and city planning boards and the incredible number of community based organizations and associations in the Flathead hold the potential to create and implement a vision for the future. Support those elected officials who are willing to take a leadership stance for a planned future. Get involved now and decide which future will become a reality.

There are many external resources available as well: Drs. Bleiker and the Institute being one of them; The planning staff from the cities and the county, the US National Park and Forest Service are available as advisors; The Flathead Land Trust has been active in conservation for the last twenty years; The Montana Land Reliance, The Trust for Public Land, The Wilderness Society, Sierra Club, DU, TU and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, The Flathead Basin Commission, and the State of Montana are also excellent sources of information and support.

The hard reality is that the past is gone. The future is up for grabs.