Final plan meeting goes smoothly

The Lakeside Community Council held a public meeting last Tuesday to gather community input and provide additional opportunity for residents and landowners to offer public comment on the recent revision and update of the Lakeside Neighborhood Plan.

With all the commotion in recent planning - and anti-planning - meetings, council members said they were relieved to hold a relatively uneventful gathering.

The entire meeting lasted just 30 minutes and, once everyone had spoken their mind, the group of individuals who had assembled in the Lakeside Chapel for the meeting quickly dispersed.

During the meeting, approximately one fourth of those in attendance signified that they were not in favor of the plan by either speaking or participating in a show of hands. Most of those who were against the plan also stated that they were opposed to planning of any kind.

"I don't appreciate you folks trying to tell me what I can do with my land - not a bit," Steve Waite said. "This is Lakeside, not New York City. I'm totally against this."

However, the majority of those in attendance said their were in favor of planning in general and of the Lakeside plan revision in particular.

"I did read all 168 pages of your plan," Yohanna Bangeman said. "I appreciate your effort to get all of the different opinions that you could. Things have really changed, and certainly we want to be able to do what we want to with our property, but we need to have a safe community."

Others, like Mary Barrett said they could understand why people would like to have the freedom to do anything they want with their own property but stressed that the anti-planning faction must realize how what they do on their property can adversely affect their neighbors and others with whom their share the lake and community. Barrett said a particular use of an individual property may actually drive property values down for others.

"You've got to think about other people," she said. "We're all here together. We don't live in caves."

Lakeside Mercantile owner Debra Newell agreed, not just on the financial aspect but also on the aesthetics. She cited the recent outrage over the storage units near Deer Creek Road but then indicated the storage units in the middle of downtown Lakeside and questioned the wisdom of allowing something so visually distasteful in the center of town.

"I just want to say that I so appreciate your efforts and we're absolutely, totally for a plan," Newell said. "If it takes a plan and if it offends a few people because they don't want to be told that you can't have something that uncared for in the middle of town so be it."

A small handful of those who attended expressed anger over not having received either notice of the plan revision or the survey that was mailed out last spring. Council secretary Barb Miller, who also serves as secretary and project manager for the Lakeside Neighborhood Plan Committee, explained the process whereby the plan was mailed out first to P.O. Boxes and then to those on the GIS tax roles, adding that she could think of no reason why anyone owning property in the Lakeside area would not have received the mailings.

Supporters said they believed the process had been well noticed and publicized, which should preclude the arguments about not receiving sufficient notice of the revision or opportunity to participate.

"It seems to me that there were plenty of articles in the newspapers that said that Lakeside was putting a survey together," Sue Handy said. "If people read the newspaper, they had plenty of opportunity. I think everybody had a fair chance to respond to the survey."

Former community council member Bruce Young was concise in his comments.

"If we fail to plan, we plan to fail," he said. "We fail this ecosystem, this lake, this community."

The public comment period for the newly revised draft of the updated Lakeside Neighborhood Plan ended on Tuesday, July 21. The Lakeside Council will make a decision next Tuesday, July 28, as to whether or not to recommend approval of the revision and forward it to the Flathead County Planning Board. If the council chooses to move forward, the next opportunity for public comment will be during the Flathead County Planning Board's review and public hearing on the plan update, to be announced at a future date.

Next Tuesday's meeting of the Lakeside Council will include consideration of the comments received between July 1 and July 21 and a determination by council members as to whether the plan merits further revision based upon those comments.

For more information about the plan and subsequent steps in the revision process, updated information is available on the the official Web site at http://lakesideplan2008.com. Further inquiry should be directed to the Lakeside Countil at LakesideCommunityCouncil@bresnan.net.