Plan seeks to reduce sprawl
The city council began work on updating its 1998 extension of services plan during a work session Jan. 20.
State law requires cities to provide a plan showing how they will provide services to areas that may one day be annexed. The plan should include a five-year urban growth boundary based on the availability of water, sewer, storm drainage, solid waste disposal, streets, and fire and police protection.
Whitefish’s 1998 plan was challenged earlier during a contentious annexation lawsuit but was upheld by the Montana Supreme Court.
Between 1997 and 2008, Whitefish has annexed 5,323 acres — including the 3,458 acres of Whitefish Lake.
“While the city has no immediate plans to annex properties, periodic annexation is critical to the long-term health of a community,” city planning director David Taylor told the council.
Taylor said pockets of unincorporated areas within and along the city limits create “inefficiencies and inequities in the delivery of services to businesses and residents.”
In addition, “annexation promotes fairness by requiring that those who reap the benefits afforded by the presence of a city and who use the services provided by a city to share in the costs of operating the city,” Taylor said.
Annexation also ensures orderly, quality growth “while reducing the potential of urban sprawl,” he said.
Impediments to growth beyond the city limits include the high cost of infrastructure, preserving important agricultural lands, large pieces of land with public or corporate ownership, soils that are unsuitable for development, seasonally-high groundwater and steep slopes.
The draft 2009 extension of services plan summarized growth potential for areas surrounding the city, including:
• Past city councils have made policy statements against extending city services on U.S. Highway 93 south of the Highway 40 junction, but “there is the potential to extend utility services at least as far as the Blanchard Lake Road intersection.”
• Once city sewer is extended out to the 26-acre Edgewood Business Park, next to the Second Street railroad crossing, the area along East Edgewood Drive “could experience additional growth pressure as more agricultural zoning is changed.”
• City water was recently extended into the Karrow Avenue area for a new church, but there has been strong neighborhood resistance to development there. “While higher density development will eventually occur due to the availability of services, current zoning and master plans call for the area to remain low-density agricultural,” the draft plan states.
• Urban-density residential development will occur along U.S. Highway 93 West as city services are “incrementally extended” past State Park Road, but development along the west shore of Whitefish Lake is limited by BNSF Railroad right-of-way.
• The East Lakeshore Drive area “has been fairly extensively developed.” The city installed a dry force sewer main for properties north of Rest Haven, but its use is not anticipated in the foreseeable future.
• City sewer has been provided up Big Mountain Road all the way to the Whitefish Mountain Ski Resort, but the area is too distant for street maintenance and police service for annexation.
• Properties out on Reservoir Road were mostly subdivided into two-acre-or-larger parcels, which tends to deter the extension of city services and annexation.
• The proposed 82-lot Bridgewater Trails subdivision could increase pressure to develop the Monegan Road area once the project has city services in place.