New regulations proposed for steep slopes

The Whitefish City Council unanimously approved a first reading of a completely rewritten draft of the city's subdivision regulations at its Nov. 2 meeting.

An earlier vote was tabled on Oct. 5 so the council could spend more time studying the draft and so one section could be reviewed by the city's Tree Advisory Committee.

It's been 14 years since the regulations were updated, and it was a top priority for city planners because of new state laws and rapid growth here. Last year, Whitefish was named the fastest growing city in Montana.

The council will take up at a later date a letter written by city attorney John Phelps on how the city's Critical Areas Ordinance (CAO) will interface with the new subdivision regulations — in particular, how the regulations deal with development on slopes exceeding 30 percent.

Phelps said wording in the current subdivision regulations did not stop development on steep slopes, and as a result, "the city had a difficult time with the CAO because there was an existing inventory of residential lots containing steep slopes."

Science shows that building on steep slopes "is generally not a positive thing," he said, but the CAO was modified to allow construction on steep slopes to protect property rights of existing lot owners.

The current subdivision regulations, which predate the CAO by more than a decade, required every lot to have a 40-by-40-foot "building pad" with a slope of less than 30 percent.

"The regulations were flawed, however, because the 40-by-40-foot pad is too small for many modern houses, and because it did not prevent the eventual lot purchasers from building elsewhere on the lot," Phelps said.

Phelps advised the council to avoid that problem with the new subdivision regulations, which replaces the 40-by-40-foot building pad with a 2,000-square-foot "clearing limits' area that will include not just the house but the garage, parking areas and driveways.

Even though the clearing limits area is 25 percent larger than the building pad area, "large homes will need to go outside" of the clearing limits area, "and they are free to do so, subject to compliance with the CAO," Phelps said.

"In effect, over the years, we will be creating hundreds of new lots that need significant CAO analysis, because they allow building on slopes greater than 30 percent," he said. "That seems to be self-defeating."

Phelps proposed two alternatives:

¥ Limit all construction and soil disturbance to slopes of less than 30 percent, or,

¥ Allow developers the choice of two options — designate on a plat a building envelope for each lot which is entirely under 30 percent and limit development to that area, or identify all land in each lot that is greater than 30 percent and state on the plat that no building or soil disturbance can occur in that area.

"I don't believe the restrictions I propose would be onerous for developers," Phelps said. "Developers are skilled at evaluating raw land to determine if it is suitable for development. If developers know the rules going in, they will tend to acquire and develop land that has plenty of buildable sites with slopes of 30 percent or less. Extremely steep land will be less attractive to developers and will see less development pressure, which is not a bad result."

Phelps' recommendations will go to the Whitefish City-County Planning Board before they come back to the city council.