Adding it up

Council looks at cost of protecting critical areas

By RICHARD HANNERS — Whitefish Pilot

Administering a new critical area ordinance could cost the city $150,000 per year, the Whitefish City Council learned Monday during a work session.

"That's a significant number," public works director John Wilson said.

The city might have to hire two additional staff persons to handle development requests that involve the proposed environmental regulations, Wilson said.

On top of that could be attorney time, education costs and even consultant fees during mediation between the city and property owners.

"It doesn't look like the permit program could pay for this," Wilson said.

Wilson said the money to pay for administering the critical areas ordinance could come out of the city's new stormwater management budget, but the $72 stormwater assessment approved by the council last year was intended for capital projects, Wilson said.

Another cost under consideration by the council was a peer review of the proposed ordinance.

The wording of the draft is "not borrowed off the shelf," consultant John Lombard said, and much of the language is not commonly used in other communities.

In terms of slope regulations, it's more common to see arbitrary figures, like the city's current 30 percent figure, rather than a site-by-site approach, Lombard said.

One way to reduce the cost of administering the ordinance would be to change the trigger point for slopes, Lombard said. Instead of requiring all sites with 10 percent or greater slopes to be evaluated for slope stability using the ordinance's matrix formula, the trigger point could be steeper — 15 percent.

Wilson said city staff supported that idea, calling 15 percent a good compromise.

Lombard also noted that the critical areas ordinance applies universally to all county land in the city's extraterritorial planning and zoning jurisdiction. He said the ordinance could be targeted at just new development and "give old owners a pass."

"This is a political decision, not a technical one," he told the council.

Consultant Randy Overton compared how the ordinance might work to "environmental audits" routinely used by Realtors. He said that over time, specialists emerged that knew how to do these kinds of audits, and their cost dropped.

When councilor Velvet Phillips-Sullivan asked about how the ordinance addressed system failures, whether there might be a "warranty" for engineered solutions to high groundwater or steep slope issues, Overton said discussion by the advisory committee about bonding was never completed.

Lombard said a bonding provision exists in the draft ordinance for mitigation, but not for high groundwater.

Wilson said covenants typically hold homeowners responsible for maintenance of French drains and other stormwater management systems.

Overton, who helped write the sections on steep slopes and groundwater, said he tried to be as nonarbitrary as possible when helping the advisory committee draft the ordinance.

He said he learned over the years he's been doing hydrogeology that the more technical an ordinance was, the more defensible it was in court.