Council considers future of plan

With no county business on the agenda - and not enough members present to constitute a quorum - the Lakeside Community Council's August meeting functioned as an informal roundtable to discuss the future of the Lakeside Neighborhood Plan revision.

Council member Barb Miller updated the members who were present, along with a few members of the public, that the Flathead County Planning Board voted at its Aug. 12 meeting to have Deputy County Attorney Jonathan Smith speak to them about their options with the plan.

Miller explained that because there is litigation pending against both Flathead County and the Lakeside Neighborhood Plan Committee, that planning board members expressed misgiving about whether it was appropriate to move forward with workshops on the document.

Miller said she was hopeful that Smith's counsel at the Sept. 2 meeting would encourage the board to set a workshop date.

"We need to go to a workshop and see what they thing about the content and not the process, because that's going to get decided elsewhere," Miller said, in reference to the lawsuit that alledges violations of the public process in creating the revision.

Council member Keith Brown agreed.

"I wish we could focus on the content because some changes will get made that will make it a better document," he said.

John Sinrud, the government affairs director of the Northwest Montana Association of Realtors, was at the meeting and chimed in concerning neighborhood plans on a few occassions.

Sinrud said that there was "confusion" about how neighborhood plans are looked at around the state, citing examples in the Bozeman area where neighborhood plans have been interpreted as regulatory documents.

"Typically, planning departments have used neighborhood plans and growth policies as regulatory," he said. "And that has given them a black eye."

In Flathead County, great pains have been undertaken by the planning office and the county commissioners to state explicitly in the growth policy that neighborhood plans are non-regulatory.

Sinrud also argued that overcomplicated regulations drive costs up for developers, which in turn limits affordable housing options because developers have to many expenses to recoup.

The council also talked about ways to improve their communication with the Lakeside community, including the possibility of setting up a Web site strictly for the council complete with schedules, minutes and other information.

Miller suggested that in addition to a Web site, some sort of internet forum could be advantagous because of various programs' ability to send people automated reminders.

Though the Lakeside Neighborhood Plan Committee recently found itself in hot water because of a provate Yahoo! group that some alledge violated open meeting laws, Miller said such a grou — if open to the public — could help bolster community participation in the process.

"It could send out automatic reminders of meeting times to anyone in the group," she said.