Mayor Feury to step down

City Council will lose its ‘institutional memory’

By RICHARD HANNERS

Whitefish Pilot

Fourteen years after he first sat down with the rest of the Whitefish City Council, mayor Andy Feury is stepping down. He will make an official announcement during the council’s Aug. 20 meeting.

Feury said his business in China is going to take up eight months of his time every year for the next two to three years. With the growth policy, the critical areas ordinance and the budget, he tried to stay on as mayor as long as he could this long as he could this year.

“I didn’t think I’d be gone as long as I was,” he said. “I thought I’d be back by mid-June. I also had a miscommunication with the city attorney about what would happen if I stepped down.”

Feury said he thought things would stay the same if he resigned, but he recently learned that deputy mayor Cris Coughlin would immediately become mayor and councilors would have to appoint someone to take her council seat for the remainder of her term, which ends this year.

His announcement will not spell the end of his participation in Whitefish government by a long shot. Feury and his wife Terri, who was born in North Valley Hospital, call Whitefish home. He may be tied up with work in China, but Feury will be a part of Whitefish for many years to come.

Feury’s political career here began when he was appointed to the council in 1991 to replace Larry Fonner. He was elected to the council in 1993 and served for four years.

After losing the 1997 mayoral election to Mike Jenson, Feury was off the council for two years. He successfully ran for mayor in 1999, ran unopposed in 2001, defeated Mike Gwiazdon in 2003 and ran unopposed in 2005. The mayoral term is now four years.

Often labeled the “institutional memory” of the city council, Feury was front and center in numerous great moments in recent Whitefish history, beginning in the early 1990s with Montana Department of Transportation’s plans to rebuild U.S. 93 from Somers all the way through Whitefish.

“It was five lanes with a suicide lane all the way,” he said. “A very active group from Whitefish got involved, some of the people who later formed Citizens For A Better Flathead, and Sen. Max Baucus stepped in and stopped the funding. The state was forced to do a full-blown environmental impact statement.”

Feury was also involved in drafting the city’s master plan update in 1995.

“It was a huge process, and a lot of the policies and goals are still valid today,” he said. “It took 18 months and was all citizen-generated, with countless hours of volunteer input. It had the same level of controversy all master plans do. Tom Tornow did a great job as chairman of the planning board.”

Feury said times were different then.

“There was less focus on money-making,” he said. “The speed with which attorneys come out now has changed the values in Whitefish.”

The annexations that began to make their way through the public process beginning in 1999 were very contentious. Many of the affected homes were already on city services, and the city’s boundary wasn’t very clean, Feury said.

“It started out very bitter, but eventually people resigned themselves to the fact that annexation was going to happen one day,” he said. “The case law established here was used in other Montana communities. Ultimately, it was the right thing to do.”

Other hard issues included drafting a neighborhood plan for the U.S. 93 strip, creating a gambling ordinance that established a casino district on the 93 strip and enacting a sign ordinance. The latter was a memorable fight.

“It happened in an election year, and opponents wrapped themselves in the American flag,” he said. “In the end, election laws were violated and some people were found guilty and fined.”

A vocal group of 20 or so who were financially affected by the sign ordinance attacked the city council, he said. The same thing is happening again with the critical areas ordinance, he said, with false allegations that promote personal agendas and not the community interest.

“As councilors, it’s not our job to help speculators in the real estate industry,” he said. “It you take a look at what’s happened out in the county, you’ll see that we have to protect Whitefish as a community or else all our property values will fall.”

Feury says there’re a lot of positive things to point out in Whitefish over the past 16 years — the Smith ballfields, O’Shaughnessy, ice rink, depot, library and The Wave.

“The list goes on and on and continues to do so,” he said. “We get things done that other communities never get done.”