The Flathead County Commission will host a public hearing on June 29 to discuss the many changes proposed for the county’s lake and lakeshore regulations.
Updating the Flathead County Lake and Lakeshore Regulations has been on the Flathead County Planning Board’s plate for the last couple of years, in the sense that the board was going to work on updating the rules as their workload allowed.
However, in 2014, the Montana Supreme Court declaring that the county has jurisdiction of the land around Whitefish called the doughnut. Once the county took over, it placed interim emergency zoning to match up as well as it could to the existing Whitefish city zones already in place.
Part of that process meant integrating two lakes – Whitefish and Coon – into the county regulations, which involved a public comment process as well as several hearings. When the county decided to include those lakes in its regulations, the commission gave the planning board the go-ahead to continue revising the lake and lakeshore regulations document.
Revising the county’s lakeshore and lake regulations will allow the county to take advantage of some of the rules created for Whitefish Lake.
The planning board worked on it, and made a slew of amendments, including changes to jurisdiction, general procedures, review procedures, criteria for issuing a permit, administration, and definitions.
The board held a public hearing and voted on May 11 to recommend that the county commission approve the amendments. The commission then voted on June 6 to move forward to the public hearing part of the process, which will be held on June 29 at 10:30 a.m. at the commission’s chambers in Kalispell.
The county’s lake and lakeshore regulations were first adopted in 1982, and have since received many updates, with the most recent being on Jan. 24, 2002. The purpose of the regulations is to protect the ecosystems of the lakes within Flathead County, while conserving the natural lakes and the value of lakeshore property.