The heavy lifting still remains for Blaine County, following a busy year of evaluation and initial long-range planning. In fact, 2005 was a year for putting on the brakes, almost entirely. In January, county commissioners voted to regroup in the face of unprecedented development interest in the Wood River Valley by calling a six-month subdivision moratorium on new developments with five or more lots.
The county seeks to stave off negative impacts to quality-of-life values such as declining open space and an exclusive housing market, which contributes to a congested highway filled with workers often forced to seek housing outside the county.
The prohibition was extended for another 12 months in June, which will carry this year's planning cycle through July 2006, when the current moratorium expires.
The decision to call a moratorium by the Blaine County Board of Commissioners sprang out of an expectation that development applications for about 300 new lots in the county would be submitted to the county in 2005 alone. The board took most of the year to study land use, public safety and welfare issues related to predictions for unprecedented growth.
In anticipation of a development application onslaught this coming summer, the county is now part way through a planning process that has included the services of three planning consultants.
Ketchum-based planning consultants Developing Green Inc. tackled the initial job of developing a list of areas for review and supplied a number of recommendations for how to approach such topics as community housing, fiscal impacts of development and regional planning. How planning goals such as more community housing development will be incorporated in ordinances to be developed in 2006 remains to be seen. Planning consultant Bill Collins, based in Jackson, Wyo., has authored a draft "inclusionary zoning ordinance" designed to require various levels of community housing associated with all new development in the county. The pending ordinance is the only piece of new legislation in the pipeline leading into 2006.
The moratorium was viewed as an opportunity to plan ahead for growth, but it was also blamed in part for inflating prices still further in the current housing bubble. Some critics began to question already last summer whether or not the county had bitten off more than it could chew, given the limited time frame for writing new ordinances.
The assignment for the consultants and county planning staff in 2005 was to uncover what the community can do to attack the potential for urban sprawl.
A third group of planning consultants, Denver-based Clarion Associates, is expected to return with a proposed growth scenario for the county. At the encouragement of county Planning Director Linda Haavik, the county with the help of Clarion hosted numerous public outreach events in 2005 called "Blaine County 2025: Where and How Will We Grow?" to maintain pubic involvement in the planning process.
Tied into the regional nature of growth impacts, a panel of three area hydrologists, "water doctors" Lee Brown, Bruce Lium and Wendy Pabich, pushed the community to look at developing a comprehensive baseline understanding of the community's water resources from a quality and quantity standpoint. The pitch to better understand the dynamics of water was another reason for calling the moratorium. Although the U.S. Geological Survey is pitching in to help with the effort to cost some $700,000, the work will not be completed before the end of the current moratorium when the delayed onslaught of development applications will likely be back on the table.
The county did succeed in developing a Water Quality Department in December, which will focus on wellhead protection by regulating maintenance of septic systems that proliferate in the county. But, for the time being, the community will not have a comprehensive understanding of its water opportunities or limitations before the end of the moratorium.
Haavik resigned in December after 14 years with the county, therefore the county will be even more pressed in its effort to develop correlating ordinances that will support a cohesive vision for growth.
In a letter announcing Haavik's resignation, Commission Chairwoman Sarah Michael expressed hope that Haavik's extensive experience could still be brought to bear as the county enters the crunch time of the next six months. The Planning and Zoning Commission is expected to begin meeting once a week to help the county achieve its growth management goals.
Collins' ordinance governing community housing will be one of the hot-button topics for public debate beginning in January, particularly of possible regulations that will impact develop in the county's A-10 and A-20 agricultural zoning areas.
Although Collins' work focuses on future development, including recommended cluster developments in the county, questions still remain as to whether new regulations will provide sufficient relief for the countywide housing crunch for working people.
One of the successes for community housing in 2005 in the county was approval of Quail Creek, a development of 126 residential housing units south of St. Luke's Wood River Medical Center and alongside The Meadows mobile-home park. Quail Creek includes 39 new affordable housing units. The project is the first in Blaine County to be developed under the newly created Community Housing Overlay District.
One of the partners in Quail Creek, Bob Kantor, said the project creates housing for people with different economic needs.
"The principle of how to condense a community was something of immense importance to us," he said. "Essential service providers such as doctors, nurses, teachers and firefighters need to have a place close to their work. They were our targets."
A recurring viewpoint reinforced by the Blaine County 2025 outreach campaign was that future growth should also be focused in and around the county's five cities. Therefore, leading into the new year, 2005 planning efforts indicate that another of the county's challenges is to hammer out Area of Impact agreements with county municipalities to foster regional planning.
Any push to achieve apparent density goals will require an unprecedented level of cooperation and diplomacy on the part of the county to groom the support of city residents and political leaders, said Ben Herman, a lead planner with Clarion, who made several visits to the Wood River Valley in 2005 to investigate the county's vision for growth. He will be back in 2006 with more planning consultants to help with the giant effort to iron out language enforcing that vision.
