Fresh thinking to support the community vision needed

Scientist Albert Einstein said, “The world we have created today as a result of our thinking thus far has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them.”

As the pace of rapid growth in the Flathead heats up even more this summer and for the foreseeable future, we want to encourage you to join us in calling for leadership in our three cities and in the county that invites fresh thinking about how we grow while retaining the unique and small-town character, rural working-landscapes, clean water, and rich wildlife, that define the Flathead Valley and its three cities.

I was reminded of this quote, which appears at the start of the downtown Kalispell plan, adopted by the City of Kalispell in 2017, as I was reviewing this plan recently. I was reviewing it because I was shocked at the response I got to a question I asked at a recent listening session on the new Kalispell transportation plan. My question was simply, how will this new draft Kalispell transportation plan support the vision and goals of the Kalispell downtown plan, developed over a number of years with broad public input. The response was blunt and alarming. I was told that the new transportation model focused on building new road capacity around Kalispell for an 85% anticipated increase in vehicle miles traveled in the next 20 years, and not on the vision set forth in the downtown Kalispell plan. The Kalispell downtown plan calls for a more landscaped and walkable downtown Kalispell with added parking. I was told Kalispell was simply going to need to redo (scrap) their downtown plan.

I was also reminded of this quote when out of the blue, with almost no public notice, the Whitefish city planning staff asked City Council on June 7 to overturn the city’s decades old policy not to extend city services south of Montana 40 along Highway 93. The Whitefish growth policy and the Whitefish downtown plan both encourage infill within the city and its downtown, and strongly discourage typical strip commercial growth south of the city limits and down Highway 93 south. The city planning staff’s recommendation was responding to recent inquiries from developers who have purchased property and want to develop commercial projects south of Montana 40 and Highway 93. Fortunately, the city council postponed a decision to June 21.

This is not the time to scrap the vision and plans that Whitefish or Kalispell have put in place to retain the unique character of these two cities and the appeal they have for locals as well as tourists. Now is the time to ask the transportation consultants in Kalispell to rerun their models to come up with fresh recommendations that will support the vision of the Kalispell downtown plan — not call for the vision to be scrapped in the face of rapid growth.

Whitefish will only be facing more and more pressure to allow more and more growth along the highway south of the city. A vision can, and should be, a powerful guide to how towns like Whitefish grow. Now is not the time to say we are all out of fresh ideas. A world class place deserves investing in some second and third opinions from some of the best in the planning world who regularly consult with communities across the country facing similar growth pressures. It’s time for Whitefish to invest in fresh thinking to support the community vision for how it should grow. To make sure policies are in place to support and shape the kind of growth the community wants. Speak up for this at the June 21 City of Whitefish hearing on this issue.

Mayre Flowers, Citizens for a Better Flathead