Somers looking at new growth plan

By ALEX STRICKLAND / Bigfork Eagle

More than a dozen Somers area residents turned up at the Somers Middle School Cafeteria on Wednesday to talk about kicking the possibility of a neighborhood plan into high gear.

Three members of the Flathead County Planning and Zoning office were on hand to talk to residents about the steps to be taken as well as some of the requirements, namely, public support.

°()()None of us are going to sit still and none of us are going to go back in time,°+/- Jeff Harris, Flathead Planning and Zoning Office director, said.

An attempt to create a neighborhood plan in the Somers area was scuttled by the Flathead County Commissioners in 1996 and since then two new zoning districts have been formed south of Somers proper in the Spring Creek area and the Old Hwy. 93 shoreline district.

But with the Planning Office on board and encouragement from some of Lakeside°Os neighborhood plan organizers, community members said they see some hope this time around.

°()()We have a wonderful opportunity here,°+/- Dennis Hatton, who has helped spearhead the effort, said.

The proposed area to be encompassed by the plan would include the Somers townsite proper, some of the areas northwest of town up Boon Road and then extending down Hwy. 93 to the edge of the Lakeside Neighborhood Plan area. The Somers plan would include the zoning districts at Spring Creek and Old Hwy. 93.

Debbie Spalding, the chair of the Lakeside Neighborhood Plan Committee, congratulated Somers on their effort to get the process started and offered encouragement. She said they hope the Lakeside plan, begun late last year, is A6P5completed and accepted by the county commissioners by the end of 2008. That time frame was offered in contrast to the three years it has taken Bigfork to revise its neighborhood plan, a process just now in the final phases.

Planning office staff outlined what would be needed to compile such a plan, including steps for community surveys, workshops and explanations on the limitations and implementation strategies that accompany such a project.

By themselves, planner Eric Giles said, a neighborhood plan is non-regulatory, meaning that legally it can be disregarded. It would be the planning offices intention, then, to come in after the neighborhood plan is completed with an implementation strategy to make the desires of the community have some legal standing. That implementation would include zoning.

°()()We think that neighborhood plans are the only way residents of neighborhoods and communities can shape how the community grows,°+/- Harris said.

Giles echoed that sentiment, explaining that such a plan would be needed so that when developers want to change the community, they would have to go through the community first instead of proceeding directly to the county level.

°()()What we°Ore trying to do here is to get you guys in the process,°+/- he said.