Shrinking buildings and a secret meeting

The public paid for the sandwiches, but it didn’t get to sample them. The Ketchum Planning and Zoning Commission had an illegal secret meeting Friday.

For 45 minutes, the P&Z listened while the city’s planning consultant proposed that the entire downtown be rezoned in a plan that would create winners and losers.

This meeting was very different from others on the city’s rewrite of its comprehensive plan. Instead of soliciting general information, the city’s planning consultant proposed specifics with effects that could ripple throughout the county.

It was simply human error that left the public in the dark, according to city planners. It was an uneven kind of error.

Somehow consultant Lee Nellis of Pocatello knew about the meeting enough in advance to have made the three-hour drive to Ketchum and to come prepared with flip charts. Somehow, two members of the city council and a quorum of the P&Z who attended were notified. Somehow, the restaurant that prepared the sandwiches for the noon confab was notified.

The public—those irritating snoops—didn’t get the five-day notice the law demands, but they still got the bill for the sandwiches.

City Council Member Sue Noel blew the whistle on the meeting when she called this newspaper to ask why there wasn’t a reporter present.

That the general public needed a psychic to find out that someone was reshuffling the deck on downtown development seemed to be of little concern to the planners and commission members.

When confronted in the middle of the meeting, Nellis said the meeting was a minor step in a huge process and stated, "We don’t have to notify the paper."

Someone needs to get this consultant a copy of the Idaho Open Meeting Law.

City planner Lisa Majdiak tried to characterize the meeting as a "work session" that hadn’t been convened as a formal meeting.

One P&Z member offered to cure the problem by departing and leaving the commission without a quorum.

P&Z chairman Peter Lipsom asked whether any more people would have attended if the meeting had been noticed. As if that mattered when no one had a choice.

Credit new City Council Member Randy Hall, who was at the meeting, for acknowledging the seriousness of the closed session. He said it’s not the way the city wants to operate.

The P&Z is going to convene today at 4:30 p.m. at Ketchum City Hall to start over. Owners of property and businesses in the downtown core need to be there or be fleeced.

We can understand why some people might want to take a look at what’s being proposed in private. It’s explosive.

Nellis is proposing a total overhaul of the city’s downtown as part of rewriting its comprehensive plan.

Just four years ago, the city rewrote requirements for downtown development. The rewrite took more than a year of meetings between planners and a citizens’ advisory committee. So, what’s a little more lightning-speed change among friends?

The newest overhaul proposal would turn the clock back more than a decade to a time when the city had two zones in its commercial core.

Planner Kathy Grotto said Nellis proposed two zones during a staff retreat the day before the P&Z’s illegal meeting. She said the zones were proposed as a way to address some residents’ dislike of new large buildings in the core.

In one zone, developers would win by being allowed to construct buildings taller than today’s 35-foot limit. Buildings could be 50-feet tall as long as underground parking is included.

To balance things out, developers of property in a second zone would lose developable density. The size of new buildings allowed in this zone would shrink.

Following the illegal meeting, Grotto said the city wouldn’t determine the shrinkage until after a new plan is approved. Developers would be asked to give opinions on a plan, but would be kept in the dark about whether they could build a multi-story building or a shoe box.

Grotto said the city would not calculate the aggregate density change in the commercial core before the proposal goes to public hearings.

Funny. If the plan called for shrinkage of city planners’ paychecks, we bet they would want to know how much they stood to lose before a plan is approved. We bet they also would be hot to know the total change in their annual salaries. They would want a chance to figure out whether the shrinkage would force them to take a second job, or find a new one.

Yet, such calculations don’t seem to be pressing issues when it comes to downtown densities, property values and the effect on the rest of the county.

We suspect the planners’ unstated goal is to reduce densities by retaining cute little cottage-style buildings and making it impossible to build the multi-story stucco boxes that have sprung up in recent years.

Density reduction could increase pressure to push commercial development into the county and create strip development along State Highway 75. It could also make doing business in Ketchum prohibitively expensive.