Comp Plan a long time coming

COEUR d'ALENE - Nine months.

Not long enough to birth a new plan.

Some are worried the Kootenai County commissioners are taking too long in their deliberations of the final draft of the county Comprehensive Plan, which the officials have been meeting on since last summer.

The several months haven't seen any major changes to the document, said Terry Harris, executive director of the Kootenai Environmental Alliance.

"The changes they've made so far have been tinkering around the edge," Harris said.

The new Comprehensive Plan - which will replace the 1994 version - is a visionary document that will act as a road map for how development should take shape in the county for at least the next 10 years.

Time is of the essence, Harris said, as the plan must be completed so the county can use it as a guideline to write new ordinances and regulations that will impact building and expansion in the county.

"It's important to update both the Comprehensive Plan and the ordinances that at this point are hopelessly out of date," said Harris, speaking of some ordinances that date back to the '70s. "A lot of development is going to occur in the next 20 years, but just in the next two or three years you need to have some clarity on what the county is going to look like."

The 17 chapters of the plan include pivotal issues like community design, property rights and land use.

But Harris, who has attended all but a few of the 26 deliberation meetings, said he has only seen the commissioners make changes on phrasing that he doesn't think affects the direction of the document.

At their most recent meeting they even skipped deliberations on density in rural areas and said they would come back to it later, he said.

"They're going line by line, and they come to the point where they have to make a decision, and they kicked that down the road," he said.

Dan Green, chairman of the Planning and Zoning Commission that wrote the final draft of the Comprehensive Plan, agrees the deliberations should have been a quick finish to allow the county to move onto the next step.

"After the hearings were closed, I would hope the deliberations would be completed within a month," he said.

Green added that he would prefer the commissioners focus their efforts on the goals, policies and land use map in the plan, which he called the meat of the document.

"I think their wordsmithing of the text is not necessary," he said. "Their job should be to make decisions, and the decisions should be on the goals and policies and the map. That's what provides the vision and the direction of the plan."

Specific wording will only be crucial when writing the actual laws that will implement the plan, said Green, who is also running for county commissioner this year.

The longer it takes for the commissioners to wrap up deliberations, he added, the longer the county will have to wait for the lengthy process of writing new laws off it.

"I've heard estimates of a year," he said of how long the regulations will take to create, a process the county has already decided to hire a separate firm to conduct. "And those are still going to require hearings before the Planning Commission and the Board of Commissioners."

The county Planning and Zoning Commission completed the final draft of the plan last January, and the county commissioners held public hearings through May.

Since then, they have been holding deliberations on the plan, reviewing the 254-page document to make any last-minute changes.

Commissioner Rick Currie said the commissioners must be meticulous with the document because it is so important for the county's future.

"There are a lot of people out there who want us to rubber stamp this document and send it on through," Currie said. "It seems like they're the same individuals who if we rubber stamp a subdivision or zone change would come over the wall."

Combing through the document will ensure it doesn't support any particular interest groups, he added.

And addressing the wording is essential because even the smallest errors or misconceptions can lead to confusion down the road, he said.

"I don't want to end up in court because of this plan," he said.

The commissioners chose to skip deliberations on densities in rural areas, he added, because they want to tackle all the minute details before making decisions on big issues.

"It will save time in the long run," Currie said.

He can't predict when the commissioners will finish the deliberations, he said.

But once they do, he added, the officials will hold another public hearing on the document to allow all members of the community to throw in their two cents.

"There is a feeling out there amongst a fairly large number of people that at the public hearings held previously, the public really didn't get a chance to voice some of their opinions," Currie said. "I have a problem with that."

Life Erickson, president of the North Idaho Building Contractors Association, said he hopes the commissioners take a good look at language to ensure the Comprehensive Plan isn't too regulatory.

"I'm glad it's not in yet," Erickson said. "The way the plan is written, if it would go in now, there's a lot of regulatory terminology that doesn't necessarily need to be in there."

It can be frustrating for members of the construction industry not to have an updated document to turn to, though, he said.

"There are some instances where it is definitely nice to have a set list of rules and know where you stand," he said. "I know a lot of people spent a lot of time working on it (the plan), and I appreciate that."