Don't lose rural soul of county

Between our two daughters, I spent 15 years as a support parent in Marion Crumb’s Diablos 4H group: hundreds of hours hauling horses to shows, weeks at horse camp, trips to Boise and Moscow for Horse Bowl competitions, etc.

I remember leaning against arena rails lamenting with other parents the time and cost investments and the various comments: halfway joking, “It’s cheaper than drug rehab/raising an out-of-wedlock baby.” The consensus, however, was the character values our children learned from the hard work and responsibility of this rural activity with large animals was invaluable.

It was an experience I desired for my own children as I found it so formative in my own life. Even though I was raised in a suburb of Los Angeles, it was a “rural residential” area with 1- to 2-acre parcels, where the bridle paths that ran between the properties were sacrosanct. We learned the value of hard work on our own land — caring for our animals, working in our garden. Fifty years later, that L.A. County neighborhood still remains large lots and zoned for horses: a rural haven of sanity.

When we moved to Idaho in 1991, ready to raise a family, I wanted that same experience for our children. I immediately became involved in the Comprehensive Plan meetings going on at that time, attending every meeting. I was happy when the area where we live (east end of Lancaster Road) was designated as rural residential: everything east of Rimrock Road slated to remain a minimum of 5-acre parcels. Alas, within what seemed a short time, that designation fell by the wayside. I became disillusioned with Kootenai County politics. What is the point of a Comprehensive Plan if it only lasts a few years?

With all the recent rampant growth in our county, more than ever, we need to look at what we want our county to be in the future. Without safeguarding rural areas in our midst, WE WILL LOSE the very character that makes our area special. We cannot simply replace everything with high density housing and expect things to remain the same. The children in our schools will not be the same; we need a certain percentage of those 4H kids in every school or we will rue the day we did not plan ahead and keep that special influence in our community. Go back and look at that 1990s Comprehensive Plan. It had a good vision!

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Denise Graves is a Hayden Lake resident.