County seeks input on Canyon Plan

By CHRIS PETERSON

Hungry Horse News

Folks from the House Of Mystery to Nyack are urged to attend a meeting to talk about updating the Canyon Neighborhood Plan — a document that steers land use issues in the area.

The plan was first written in 1994, but state law requires that all neighborhood plans be updated to conform to the county's growth policy. As such, the Canyon plan is due.

The plan doesn't address zoning, noted county planner B.J. Grieve, who is heading up the effort to re-examine the plan.

For example, Hungry Horse does not have zoning, and wouldn't have to adopt zoning even when the Canyon Plan is rewritten.

Zoning laws are separate from the neighborhood plan, Grieve noted last week.

The existing Canyon Plan offers suggestions for land use planning. For example, it calls for maintaining the rural character of the area, recognizing the natural features, but still looks to provide quality residential and commercial development.

As such, it sets a list of goals, for residential, industrial, agriculture and forestry and parks and open space development.

But many things have changed since 1994 when the plan was written. The Forest Service sold 90-plus acres of land it owned in Hungry Horse and a developer has plans to put homes there. Farther up the canyon off Belton Stage Road, there are concerns about a gravel operation near homes and Glacier National Park.

Other swaths of land that were once privately owned but were vacant are now springing up into multi-million dollar developments with odd lots sizes, poor access and emergency service — problems that probably weren't imagined 13 years ago.

The initial meeting, scheduled for Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. at the Canyon Elementary School, is designed to talk about the process of re-examining the plan and to attract members of a volunteer committee who are willing to work on the document, Grieve said.

Committee members should be full-time Canyon residents and Grieve said he'd like to have a few folks from each neighborhood sit on it in order to get a broad representation.