'Donut' issue is No. 1 story of 2010

Planning authority in rural Whitefish,

cleaning up the Whitefish River and zebra mussels in Flathead Lake

are the Whitefish Pilot’s top three stories of 2010. Rounding out

the top five are stories about medical marijuana and the creation

of an independent library for Whitefish.

The ‘doughnut’

The continuing controversy over

Whitefish’s governance of the two-mile planning and zoning

“doughnut” area surrounding the city made the front page dozens of

times this year.

Spearheaded by two of the city

council’s three new members, a city-county committee was tasked

with negotiating a settlement to the city’s lawsuit against the

county for unilaterally rescinding the 2005 interlocal agreement

that had created the doughnut area.

Councilor Bill Kahle, who had

represented the council in one-on-one meetings with Flathead County

commissioner Jim Dupont, asked the council in March to formally

request a delay in court proceedings so negotiations could start.

“It’s an olive branch,” he said.

On June 21, the council unanimously

agreed to send three “concepts” to the city and county’s attorneys

for drafting into a revised interlocal agreement. Mayor Mike Jenson

expressed his opposition, noting that the city could end up bearing

the burden of paying for planning in the doughnut while the county

got veto power.

Criticism of the proposed interlocal

agreement by both city and doughnut residents was strong and even

emotional, but sometimes for opposite reasons. While some, such as

former Montana Supreme Court Justice Terry Trieweiler, argued that

everyone would be better served if Whitefish controlled development

in the doughnut, many critics of the draft agreement wanted some

type of representation for doughnut residents who can’t vote for

city councilors.

A turnaround in the negotiations

process took place when the county commissioners traveled to

Whitefish for an Oct. 18 work session. In a surprise announcement,

the three commissioners and six councilors agreed to totally

eliminate a section of the draft agreement that would have given

the county veto power over new legislation created by the city

council that affected property in the doughnut.

Members of the negotiating committee

all agreed that the three remaining provisions in the draft

agreement adequately addressed the main concerns raised in the

lawsuit — one-year termination, five-year duration and non-binding

mediation.

The city council approved the revised

agreement and agreed to dismiss the lawsuit on Nov. 15 by 3-2

votes. Kahle was still laid up from a motor vehicle accident and

missed the meeting. As resolutions, the measures did not require

four votes to pass. The three commissioners traveled to Whitefish

again on Nov. 30 and unanimously approved the new agreement.

As the year drew to a close and the

issue at last seemed to be resolved, intervenors in the city’s

lawsuit announced they intended to ask the district court judge to

make a ruling on the merits of the case despite the city and

county’s settlement. What was missing from the agreement, Whitefish

attorney Sean Frampton said, was representation for doughnut area

residents.

Meanwhile, a group of city and county

residents opposed to the settlement drafted a referendum for city

residents aimed at repealing the revised interlocal agreement and

an initiative for doughnut residents calling for the establishment

of an elected community council to represent them.

Once again, resolution of the dispute

appears to be threatened by groups with similar goals but different

means — while some want representation by the county commissioners,

others want representation by a community council.

River cleanup

The BNSF Superfund site and river

cleanup was the No. 1 story for the Pilot in 2009. More than

100,000 gallons of diesel fuel that spilled over the decades at

BNSF’s locomotive refueling facility remain in an underground plume

above the river.

After the Environmental Protection

Agency determined in spring 2009 that the spilled fuel had

contaminated the Whitefish River, it ordered a section of the river

below the fueling facility isolated with a steel coffer dam and

cleaned up. The last sheet pile was removed from the 500-foot long

dam on Jan. 22, but the project was far from over.

Property owners in the gentrifying

Railroad District, alarmed that news about the underground plumes

of diesel fuel could affect real estate values, got some good news

in January. Lab results from 25 soil-borings across the

neighborhood revealed little or no contamination from the

plumes.

In July, the EPA announced plans to

drain the river from west of the BNSF roundhouse downstream to the

Second Street bridge. Portable dams were installed at both

locations, and the slow-moving river was diverted into three

48-inch diameter plastic pipes

The isolated section of Whitefish River

was dry by noon on Sept. 3. Contaminated sediment was pumped out as

slurry to a treatment facility near the roundhouse, where it was

mixed with lime and loaded into railroad cars for transportation to

an approved disposal site.

The dams were opened up again by the

end of October. Heavy equipment had removed up to 18 inches of

contaminated sediment from the river bottom — including some

historic logs. The dams and pipes will be put back to use next year

to clean up a smaller section of river about 500 feet upstream of

the BNSF property line.

The river cleanup project extends all

the way to the Highway 40 bridge, but how the cleanup will proceed

further downstream has not been determined, the EPA said. The worst

contamination has been located at the Riverside Park footbridge and

just downstream of the Columbia Avenue bridge, where the river

caught fire in May 1970, sending flames 75 feet into the air.

Zebra mussels

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Park’s

announcement that zebra mussels may have been found in Flathead

Lake could be the story of the year for the entire state of Montana

— if it’s true.

For now, the results are not

conclusive, but larval samples collected from the northern end of

the lake near Woods Bay during routine water-quality sampling were

suspected to be from the nonnative species.

Many people in Montana are familiar

with spotted knapweed and how the nonnative weed spread from the

Bitterroot Valley to forests and farm lands across the Pacific

Northwest in just several decades. Zebra mussels threaten to do the

same to Montana’s pristine lakes.

First discovered in the U.S. in the

Great Lakes in the 1980s, zebra mussels have since spread

throughout the Midwestern and mid-Atlantic states. A predator

doesn’t exist in the U.S. to keep the exotic mussels in check.

Zebra mussels can reproduce and spread

rapidly, especially on hard surfaces like docks, piers and boat

hulls — even attaching themselves to the shells of living

organisms, such as lobsters and clams. The mussels can also block

water intake pipes, cover beaches with razor-sharp shells and

impact fishery populations.

The good news for now is that samples

from Whitefish Lake and other local lakes for the past two years

have come back negative for signs of zebra mussels, according to

Whitefish Lake Institute executive director Mike Koopal.

But he says he knows of one confirmed

case of a boat that traveled here from Nevada’s Lake Mead, where

the zebra mussels were discovered in 2007. And lakes here have

enough calcium to promote growth of the invasive species, he

notes.

Medical

marijuana

“Medical marijuana zoning is a complex

issue,” city planning director David Taylor told the Whitefish

City-County Planning Board on Jan. 21 in what could be the

understatement of the year. It was the board’s job to review

proposed zoning regulations for a new industry that was not only

controversial but growing quickly.

The city council had passed an urgency

ordinance in December 2009 prohibiting medical marijuana businesses

within the city and one mile of the city limits until a permanent

ordinance could be approved to regulate the new industry.

By January, six years after voters

approved Initiative 148 allowing the medical use of marijuana,

5,440 people in Montana had registered as medical marijuana

patients and 1,578 as caregivers. By November, there were more than

23,000 cardholders.

Four months after the planning board

began looking at zoning medical marijuana growers and sellers, as

cities and counties across the state struggled with ways to

regulate the businesses, the board came up with a draft zoning

ordinance.

The city council, however, was not

ready to vote on the board’s recommendation. With the urgency

ordinance still in place and state legislators promising to address

vague language in the state’s medical marijuana law during the 2011

session, the council tabled a vote on the planning board’s draft

zoning on May 17 and again on July 6.

In the meantime, police logs and court

dockets across the state were filled with cases tied to medical

marijuana — from major producers and caregiver organizers in

Missoula to a highly publicized murder case in Kalispell.

Library secedes

Personality conflicts between staff at

the White-fish public library and the Flathead County Library

System’s board of trustees had been brewing for about a year when

members of the Whitefish Ad Hoc Library Committee presented their

report to the city council in May.

Their recommendation — secede from the

county and form an independent library under the city’s parks and

recreation department that would continue to be open to people

living around Whitefish.

Acknowledging a possible budget

shortfall, the Whitefish Library Association pledged $15,000 a year

for the next five years to support an independent city library.

Then in October, library supporters Jake and Connie Heckathorn

announced they would donate $100,000 to help defray maintenance and

operation costs.

As the deadline neared for the city to

give its termination notice to the county, the Montana Attorney

General’s Office issued a preliminary opinion saying tax revenue

that currently goes to the county library system could be diverted

to a city library.

For the fiscally conservative city

councilors, transferring the 5.95 mills collected by the county to

city coffers was a wash. But getting the city out from under a

potential $18 million bond levy for a new county library in

Kalispell was even a bigger plus, and on Oct. 18, the council voted

unanimously to form an independent city library.