Council adopts transitional zoning district

After over a year of public hearings and work sessions, the Whitefish City Council finally voted to establish the transitional zoning district (WB-T).

The recently adopted Highway 93 South Corridor Plan calls for the creation of a highway transitional zoning district for newly annexed properties in the area south of Montana 40.

Mayor John Muhlfeld was absent at the meeting last week so Deputy Mayor Frank Sweeney ran the meeting that saw even more discussion about the zoning district.

A friendly amendment from Councilor Ben Davis passed 5-1 with Councilor Rebecca Norton voting in opposition. Davis changed “multi-family” to “six-plex” in the conditional use of higher-density residential. Then, the motion to approve the ordinance passed unanimously.

Work began over a year ago on the zoning district and the last time the council met to discuss it, on Nov. 21, they directed staff to make more changes to the proposed code.

“The changes you asked us to look at were moving the majority of the permitted uses into the conditional use permit category, making the frontage and backage road portion mandatory and increasing the buffers between that zoning and the residential zoning adjacent,” Whitefish Planning Director Dave Taylor said.

He reminded the council that the Highway 93 South Corridor Plan calls for this transitional zoning district and despite all the changes, the code still meets the Growth Plan criteria.

“The intent of this is to create some kind of a zoning district that could still entice those property owners to annex into the city, to get on city water and sewer,” Taylor said. “This just creates the zoning in our zoning code, it doesn’t apply it to any properties. That’ll have to come if somebody decides to annex.”

The list of permitted uses was a major issue for council throughout the process. The list of permitted uses was eventually whittled down to ADUs, daycares, home occupations, public utility buildings, manufactured homes and single-family dwellings. Full conditional use permits (CUPs) are required for over 20 additional uses.

Taylor described it as a residential zone that has some light commercial options. Higher-density residential options are a conditional use.

“What we’ve done as a city is we’ve created more oversight by requiring full CUPs for everything else, that (go) through the planning board and the city council,” Norton said.

The unlimited maximum density was concerning to Davis, whose friendly amendment limits the number of units in a multi-family building to six. He said good city planning would not put the highest-density housing on the edge of town.

“Every time (every person that lives there) wants to go to the grocery store, they have to drive all the way into the middle of town. It has zero walkability,” Davis said. “In my mind, it represents poor city planning for us to be trying to push high-density projects out of town like that.”

Councilor Steve Qunell agreed with Davis that the housing is needed but this is not a good place for it right now.

“Maybe (when) we have better public transportation that gets people into town, then maybe that makes more sense, but now we’re just adding more cars to the road,” Qunell said.

In addition to the changes in uses, the bulk and scale standard for a CUP was reduced from 10,000 square feet to 7,500 square feet and a provision was added to set a limit on the maximum building footprint at 15,000 square feet.

The code also requires a 50-foot landscaped buffer when abutting Highway 93 and Montana 40 and a 30-foot landscaped buffer when abutting residential or agricultural-zoned properties.

Once a property owner chooses to annex, the new zoning district will ensure any development is in keeping with the city’s regulations including its architectural review, subdivision requirements and water quality protection standards.

After five previous city council public hearings and several work sessions, the long-awaited WB-T business transitional district is in the books.