Council shoots down future land use plan

Whitefish City Council in a split vote on Monday rejected a land use plan for 70 acres fronting U.S. Highway 93 South.

Whitefish 57 LLC and Eagle Enterprises had been seeking a subarea plan for property between JP Road and Park Knoll Lane. The developer was looking to allow both commercial and residential future development on the property.

Council voted 4-2 to deny the subarea plan. Councilors Ryan Hennen and Katie Williams voted in opposition.

Councilor Richard Hildner said he and fellow Councilors wrestled with the vote as they attempted to determine a vision for Whitefish for the next 50 years.

“My sense amongst Council is that this is one of the most challenging and difficult decisions we have had to make,” he said. “We’ve looked at input from all sides. I had to determine what decision was best not for the closest neighbors or the developer, but what is best for Whitefish.”

Williams agreed that she too struggled with a decision “going back and forth” because any change is difficult, but ultimately favored approving the subarea plan because she said it was about a larger view for eventual development.

“There is still a lot of process this would have to go through before it’s developed,” she said. “This is not about approving a development now. This is not even a zoning designation. This is what is appropriate in terms of land use.”

Developers took the first version of the proposal before the Whitefish Planning Board in January. Since then the subarea plan has undergone numerous changes and multiple public hearings have been held on it before the planning board and Council.

The most recent version for the subarea plan looked to designate a total of 12.6 acres along the highway as commercial. The center 10.6 acres along the proposed Baker Avenue extension to be urban with possibly one- or two-family residential zoning, and for the 10.9 acres to the west to be urban with one-family residential zoning.

The subarea plan document says that the western 35 acres, which includes the wetlands, are to be left in existing land use designations of suburban and rural.

Originally the plan had called for some multi-family housing.

Through multiple public hearings, neighbors of the proposed subarea plan have said that the plan could have grave impacts to wetlands to the west, be an end of the wildlife corridor and be detrimental to the folks who live in the neighborhoods surrounding the area.

While supporters have said that it would provide necessary affordable workforce housing assisting with Whitefish’s goal to increase the inventory of such housing.

The developers have said the intention for the project is to provide affordable housing. The most recent version of the plan said they would provide 10 percent of the housing units as affordable in addition to whatever the city requires at the time of an eventual development application.

The developer had also agreed to limit the number of residential units to a maximum of 250 total.

Earlier this month Council listened to more than an hour of public comment on the plan, but citing the late hour chose to delay its decision until Monday.

Councilor Andy Feury said the public discussion on the subarea plan often got lost in a level of detail that was not relevant to a plan that would have been an amendment to the growth policy.

“The WR-2 zoning that is called out in the plan would become an expectation that they would get that zoning,” he said. “That is a direction that we were being pointed in and we can’t derail that.”

Feury noted that the plan calls for a level of density that he wasn’t comfortable approving.

Councilor Frank Sweeney said there might be ways for the plan to work, but Council couldn’t redraw the plan for the developer.

He said the community benefits provided in the plan — building an extension of Baker Avenue and providing affordable housing — were not enforceable.

“There is no condition to require whether Baker ultimately gets built,” he said. “It is difficult to have the assurance that the housing would meet our needs.”

A subarea plan is an amendment to the growth policy similar to a neighborhood plan, though a subarea plan is applied to vacant land.