Overlay homeowners take aim at ordinance
Neighbors of county community housing district fear growth potential
By GREG STAHL
Express Staff Writer
When Blaine County adopted an ordinance in May to encourage developers to build community housing, there was little fanfare and not much public debate.
But a group of homeowners who live inside the boundaries of the 2-square-mile area impacted by the new ordinance are up in arms and asking the county to reconsider its Community Housing Planned Unit Development Overlay District, which is in and around McHanville, south of Ketchum.
?People in this neighborhood are very upset,? said Sun Valley Co. General Manager Wally Huffman, who is one of the homeowners inside the overlay district. ?I am trying to create a solution, one that works for everybody.?
Huffman said there are 46 homeowners living in eight subdivisions along Broadway Run. Representatives from each subdivision have been meeting weekly to look for solutions.
What the county?s Community Housing overlay district did was create an area where developers can ask for higher developable densities if they propose to build deed-restricted community housing. The overlay allows developers to ask for up to 10 units per acre, which is far denser than the county?s most permissive zoning designation.
Were maximum development densities ever to be achieved in the area, there could be up to 1,800 units. Assuming that 2.5 people live in each unit, 4,500 people could live in that 180-acre area.
?It could be a town the size of Ketchum,? Huffman said. ?That could happen. I?m not saying it will happen.?
The flip side of the coin, which county officials discussed before approving the ordinance, is that subdivisions will be approved on a case-by-case basis. Practically speaking, the county would never allow development to the extent Huffman described, said Commission Chairman Dennis Wright.
?I think that?s a very poor analysis,? Wright said. ?That?s just taking gross numbers and multiplying without recognizing that there would be vast consideration about traffic considerations and everything, everything associated with growth before you?d every get anywhere close to those numbers.
?That?s just not a rational analysis.?
The existing homeowners are also unhappy that the final ordinance appeared to be passed relatively quickly, and it was, although county officials worked on the document off and on for the better part of a decade.
Blaine County Commissioners voted unanimously Monday, May 3 to adopt the ordinance, which the county planning and zoning commission began wrestling with in February 2001. The Blaine County Housing Authority?not the Blaine-Ketchum Housing Authority?began working on the document in 1997.
Also, the original ordinance would have applied on a countywide basis, but objections from the cities of Hailey and Bellevue triggered a large-scale rollback of lands proposed to be include. Only the most recent draft, which emerged after a winter of redrafting, included the scaled back overlay district.
Huffman said the county did not conduct any studies about water, schools, socioeconomic issues or transportation impacts before approving the district.
?The problem is, they don?t ever intend for it (construction of 1,800 units in that area) to happen,? Huffman said. ?But what?s the harm with putting a cap on it so it never does happen.?
And it does appear that there is at least some demand for high-density housing in the area. This fall, local developers George Kirk and Robert Kantor submitted an application to the Blaine County Planning Department proposing to build 126 homes in the overlay district, 43 of which would be saddled with deed restrictions to limit their initial costs and ongoing inflation.
The development, to be called Clearcreek Meadows, would be built on 23 acres south of the St. Luke?s Wood River Medical Center on the east side of Highway 75.
?Most of the people who live along Broadway Run that I have talked to, their focus is not the proposal by Kirk and Kantor, but the overlay,? Huffman said. ?My guess is that type of compromise would not meet with serious resistance in the neighborhood.?
Huffman said he, personally, is a proponent of community housing. His proposal, which he has submitted to county leaders, is to amend the overlay to allow a maximum of 300 units and to permit them on a first-come-first-served basis.
?It isn?t like we don?t want any there. It?s just that we don?t want to spend the rest of our lives dealing with the potential buildout there,? he said. ?The truth is, we need community housing, and we need to integrate it into the neighborhoods but not concentrate it in one neighborhood.?
Commissioner Sarah Michael said the county would continue to monitor the overlay district closely.
?We monitor as this ordinance is implemented,? she said. ?You monitor the impacts. If the cumulative impacts are exceeding acceptable impacts on the infrastructure, then you take action.?
And Wright stressed that the county is not in the business of soiling people?s homes.
?I think the commission is cognizant of the values owners put on their own little spaces, and it?s not our intention to denigrate or cheapen or ruin the dreams that people have built by trying to accommodate something like affordability,? Wright said.
