For the week of May 28 - June 3, 2003

Picabo zoning plan creeps toward finale

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By PAT MUPHY
Express Staff Writer

With a few final tweaks to the original proposal, Blaine County Planning and Zoning commissioners approved a zoning plan last week for the tiny southeast Blaine County hamlet of Picabo.

The county’s P&Z department will now prepare a formal document with the zoning changes and resubmit it to the P&Z commission for final approval, then transmit it to the three-member Blaine County Commission for action.

This takes Picabo’s major landowner, Nick Purdy, whose family settled in the area in the 1880s, one step closer to the finale of a process he began several years ago to change some zoning, maintain other zoning and create uniformity in land use in the farming and ranching community.

With a population of about 40, Purdy estimates that if Picabo were fully developed with housing, it would have a total of about 100 homes.

With the cost of resort area housing in the Ketchum and Sun Valley area stirring a southward search for less expensive homes and home sites, Picabo is considered a future community of seasonal second-home buyers and working commuters.

About a 45-minute drive from Ketchum, Picabo is located on U.S. Highway 20, 11 miles east of its intersection with Highway 75 at Timmerman Junction.

The P&Z commission generally agreed Thursday, May 22, with Purdy’s zoning requests for about 90 acres.

One tract along U.S. 20 of approximately 32 acres zoned agricultural was rezoned to R-5 five-acre residential lots. An adjoining tract of 18.5 acres was rezoned from light industrial to R-5.

A 2.32-acre agricultural tract along the highway was rezoned to commercial. A small tract of less than an acre was changed from R-.4 (less than an acre residential) to commercial.

A large area north of the small airport, behind the Silver Creek Store, was changed from R-1 to R-5. The area around the small grass runway airport was changed to light industrial, and an agricultural area Purdy sought to change to residential was maintained as agricultural, and a nearby area he wanted to rezone from R-.4 to agricultural was rezoned to R-1.

Purdy told the commission that he will sell some lots for residential development to help meet costs of his other operations, including Purdy Livestock Co., but the full development of the area would not come for years.

The area has sufficient water for development, but no sewer system. Commissioners seemed to believe that continued reliance on septic tanks would be acceptable.

Purdy’s application for land use changes has met with only minimal objections, but has had strong support from residents of the area.

 

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