Approval speaks volumes for plan

Letter from the editor

After more than four years of meetings, the Bigfork Neighborhood Plan appears to have just one gathering to get through.

After last week's recommendation for approval from the Flathead County Planning Board, the county commissioners will be the final body to weigh the merit of the 100-plus page non-regulatory document.

To say the planning board's unanimous vote for recommendation was surprising would be selling the feat short. By garnering votes from the board's very left, center and very right members, the carefully crafted document has an enormous endorsement as it heads toward the last hurdle.

Make no mistake, there are passages in the plan that, were it regulatory, would be a property-rights activist's nightmare. But from the start, the plan's proponents' main argument has been that it is not regulatory and so anything in it more stringent than county regulations is simply a recommendation.

After recommending a raft of small changes, the planning board seemingly saw the plan for what it was: The product of an incredible amount of labor from a group of committed volunteers. The Bigfork Steering Committee held upwards of 100 meetings and conducted an extensive — if unscientific — survey of landowners inside the planning area established in 1993 when the original plan was enacted.

And that is part of what is so incredible about the length of the process; Bigfork already had a neighborhood plan, this is merely an update. For a community like Somers, which is in the process of creating a neighborhood plan, the task must seem incredibly daunting.

For Bigfork, it has been, as planning board member Mike Mower perfectly put it, "a long and tortured path."

The commissioners will no doubt have some concerns when the Bigfork document arrives at their desk, but with the full endorsement of the planning board behind it, the end of this long saga should be in sight.

—Alex Strickland