After three years of contentious conversations, countless pages of public comment and division among local advocacy groups, the Whitefish city council on Monday night gave its final stamp of approval to the planning document that will guide city growth over the next 20 years — a feat that garnered applause from meeting attendees and a collective exhale from city staff.
The final version of the growth policy unanimously approved by councilors, however, features a reversal of edits made earlier this month after Sen. Ellie Boldman, D-Missoula, sent a letter to the city asserting the planning document side-steps legal requirements set by the state in what she characterized as an “evasion mechanism.”
In the March 27 letter, the Missoula lawmaker said the city’s draft circumvented state guidelines restricting exclusionary zoning practices and inserted conditions that make it more difficult for developers to build 60-foot buildings “by right” in certain zones of the city.
Boldman highlighted four “specific legal deficiencies” in the proposed growth policy that she believed undermined the state’s legislative intent to address Montana’s housing shortage. Over the past three years, the city has been in the process of updating its 2007 growth policy in response to another piece of legislation, the Montana Land Use Planning Act (MLUPA), that also aims to address the housing crisis by easing development standards and moving approval of individual projects to a faster, more administrative staff level with less public notice.
As a primary sponsor of the cited legislation, Boldman in the letter said she would testify in court should the councilors adopt the document and face legal repercussions.
At their April 6 meeting, council members expressed a strong distaste for Boldman’s intervention, saying the state is once again attempting to step in and override the city’s planning capabilities. Despite this, the council ultimately decided to remove the offending text under Boldman’s scrutiny in the growth policy draft.
At Monday night’s meeting, however, councilors unanimously agreed to add the language in question back into the document ahead of their final vote to adopt the Vision Whitefish 2045 Community Plan.
Councilor Steve Qunell earlier this month said the 60-foot building requirements in relation to the city’s downtown core may be the “hill to die on” for the city. He had the same message on Monday when making the motion to reverse their previous edits.
“I think that by allowing 60-foot buildings in our downtown, we are opening the door to a lot of change that we don’t want to see in this community,” Qunell said. “Our downtown is the main part of what Whitefish is and what it has historically been, and if we have 60-foot buildings downtown, which is going to be mostly new construction, that’s going to take away a lot of our old historic facades. It changes the character of our town completely.”
Policies added back to the land use implementation strategy, entitled “Protect the Character and Scale of Downtown,” included form-based standards related to height allowances, such as step backs and lot coverage limits, and redefining the downtown zone into sub-areas to better protect the historic core — two strategies that were directly referenced in Boldman’s letter.
Additionally, both Qunell and Councilor Rebecca Norton asserted that the growth policy document has no regulatory power anyway, meaning it cannot force any developers to abide by any 60-foot height restrictions. This is something that could instead be enforced through the city’s zoning regulations.
“It is not regulatory,” Qunell said. “This is a vision statement, and without having that language, it may prevent us from doing something in our zoning that protects us as well.”
With the state-mandated update to its growth policy now through the city council, the city’s focus will now shift to getting its zoning and subdivision regulations in compliance with MLUPA requirements. The planning commission is set to have a public hearing on the first set of zoning updates on April 29.