'Donut' issue is No. 1 story of 2010
Planning authority in rural Whitefish,
cleaning up the Whitefish River and zebra mussels in Flathead Lake
are the Whitefish Pilot’s top three stories of 2010. Rounding out
the top five are stories about medical marijuana and the creation
of an independent library for Whitefish.
The ‘doughnut’
The continuing controversy over
Whitefish’s governance of the two-mile planning and zoning
“doughnut” area surrounding the city made the front page dozens of
times this year.
Spearheaded by two of the city
council’s three new members, a city-county committee was tasked
with negotiating a settlement to the city’s lawsuit against the
county for unilaterally rescinding the 2005 interlocal agreement
that had created the doughnut area.
Councilor Bill Kahle, who had
represented the council in one-on-one meetings with Flathead County
commissioner Jim Dupont, asked the council in March to formally
request a delay in court proceedings so negotiations could start.
“It’s an olive branch,” he said.
On June 21, the council unanimously
agreed to send three “concepts” to the city and county’s attorneys
for drafting into a revised interlocal agreement. Mayor Mike Jenson
expressed his opposition, noting that the city could end up bearing
the burden of paying for planning in the doughnut while the county
got veto power.
Criticism of the proposed interlocal
agreement by both city and doughnut residents was strong and even
emotional, but sometimes for opposite reasons. While some, such as
former Montana Supreme Court Justice Terry Trieweiler, argued that
everyone would be better served if Whitefish controlled development
in the doughnut, many critics of the draft agreement wanted some
type of representation for doughnut residents who can’t vote for
city councilors.
A turnaround in the negotiations
process took place when the county commissioners traveled to
Whitefish for an Oct. 18 work session. In a surprise announcement,
the three commissioners and six councilors agreed to totally
eliminate a section of the draft agreement that would have given
the county veto power over new legislation created by the city
council that affected property in the doughnut.
Members of the negotiating committee
all agreed that the three remaining provisions in the draft
agreement adequately addressed the main concerns raised in the
lawsuit — one-year termination, five-year duration and non-binding
mediation.
The city council approved the revised
agreement and agreed to dismiss the lawsuit on Nov. 15 by 3-2
votes. Kahle was still laid up from a motor vehicle accident and
missed the meeting. As resolutions, the measures did not require
four votes to pass. The three commissioners traveled to Whitefish
again on Nov. 30 and unanimously approved the new agreement.
As the year drew to a close and the
issue at last seemed to be resolved, intervenors in the city’s
lawsuit announced they intended to ask the district court judge to
make a ruling on the merits of the case despite the city and
county’s settlement. What was missing from the agreement, Whitefish
attorney Sean Frampton said, was representation for doughnut area
residents.
Meanwhile, a group of city and county
residents opposed to the settlement drafted a referendum for city
residents aimed at repealing the revised interlocal agreement and
an initiative for doughnut residents calling for the establishment
of an elected community council to represent them.
Once again, resolution of the dispute
appears to be threatened by groups with similar goals but different
means — while some want representation by the county commissioners,
others want representation by a community council.
River cleanup
The BNSF Superfund site and river
cleanup was the No. 1 story for the Pilot in 2009. More than
100,000 gallons of diesel fuel that spilled over the decades at
BNSF’s locomotive refueling facility remain in an underground plume
above the river.
After the Environmental Protection
Agency determined in spring 2009 that the spilled fuel had
contaminated the Whitefish River, it ordered a section of the river
below the fueling facility isolated with a steel coffer dam and
cleaned up. The last sheet pile was removed from the 500-foot long
dam on Jan. 22, but the project was far from over.
Property owners in the gentrifying
Railroad District, alarmed that news about the underground plumes
of diesel fuel could affect real estate values, got some good news
in January. Lab results from 25 soil-borings across the
neighborhood revealed little or no contamination from the
plumes.
In July, the EPA announced plans to
drain the river from west of the BNSF roundhouse downstream to the
Second Street bridge. Portable dams were installed at both
locations, and the slow-moving river was diverted into three
48-inch diameter plastic pipes
The isolated section of Whitefish River
was dry by noon on Sept. 3. Contaminated sediment was pumped out as
slurry to a treatment facility near the roundhouse, where it was
mixed with lime and loaded into railroad cars for transportation to
an approved disposal site.
The dams were opened up again by the
end of October. Heavy equipment had removed up to 18 inches of
contaminated sediment from the river bottom — including some
historic logs. The dams and pipes will be put back to use next year
to clean up a smaller section of river about 500 feet upstream of
the BNSF property line.
The river cleanup project extends all
the way to the Highway 40 bridge, but how the cleanup will proceed
further downstream has not been determined, the EPA said. The worst
contamination has been located at the Riverside Park footbridge and
just downstream of the Columbia Avenue bridge, where the river
caught fire in May 1970, sending flames 75 feet into the air.
Zebra mussels
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Park’s
announcement that zebra mussels may have been found in Flathead
Lake could be the story of the year for the entire state of Montana
— if it’s true.
For now, the results are not
conclusive, but larval samples collected from the northern end of
the lake near Woods Bay during routine water-quality sampling were
suspected to be from the nonnative species.
Many people in Montana are familiar
with spotted knapweed and how the nonnative weed spread from the
Bitterroot Valley to forests and farm lands across the Pacific
Northwest in just several decades. Zebra mussels threaten to do the
same to Montana’s pristine lakes.
First discovered in the U.S. in the
Great Lakes in the 1980s, zebra mussels have since spread
throughout the Midwestern and mid-Atlantic states. A predator
doesn’t exist in the U.S. to keep the exotic mussels in check.
Zebra mussels can reproduce and spread
rapidly, especially on hard surfaces like docks, piers and boat
hulls — even attaching themselves to the shells of living
organisms, such as lobsters and clams. The mussels can also block
water intake pipes, cover beaches with razor-sharp shells and
impact fishery populations.
The good news for now is that samples
from Whitefish Lake and other local lakes for the past two years
have come back negative for signs of zebra mussels, according to
Whitefish Lake Institute executive director Mike Koopal.
But he says he knows of one confirmed
case of a boat that traveled here from Nevada’s Lake Mead, where
the zebra mussels were discovered in 2007. And lakes here have
enough calcium to promote growth of the invasive species, he
notes.
Medical
marijuana
“Medical marijuana zoning is a complex
issue,” city planning director David Taylor told the Whitefish
City-County Planning Board on Jan. 21 in what could be the
understatement of the year. It was the board’s job to review
proposed zoning regulations for a new industry that was not only
controversial but growing quickly.
The city council had passed an urgency
ordinance in December 2009 prohibiting medical marijuana businesses
within the city and one mile of the city limits until a permanent
ordinance could be approved to regulate the new industry.
By January, six years after voters
approved Initiative 148 allowing the medical use of marijuana,
5,440 people in Montana had registered as medical marijuana
patients and 1,578 as caregivers. By November, there were more than
23,000 cardholders.
Four months after the planning board
began looking at zoning medical marijuana growers and sellers, as
cities and counties across the state struggled with ways to
regulate the businesses, the board came up with a draft zoning
ordinance.
The city council, however, was not
ready to vote on the board’s recommendation. With the urgency
ordinance still in place and state legislators promising to address
vague language in the state’s medical marijuana law during the 2011
session, the council tabled a vote on the planning board’s draft
zoning on May 17 and again on July 6.
In the meantime, police logs and court
dockets across the state were filled with cases tied to medical
marijuana — from major producers and caregiver organizers in
Missoula to a highly publicized murder case in Kalispell.
Library secedes
Personality conflicts between staff at
the White-fish public library and the Flathead County Library
System’s board of trustees had been brewing for about a year when
members of the Whitefish Ad Hoc Library Committee presented their
report to the city council in May.
Their recommendation — secede from the
county and form an independent library under the city’s parks and
recreation department that would continue to be open to people
living around Whitefish.
Acknowledging a possible budget
shortfall, the Whitefish Library Association pledged $15,000 a year
for the next five years to support an independent city library.
Then in October, library supporters Jake and Connie Heckathorn
announced they would donate $100,000 to help defray maintenance and
operation costs.
As the deadline neared for the city to
give its termination notice to the county, the Montana Attorney
General’s Office issued a preliminary opinion saying tax revenue
that currently goes to the county library system could be diverted
to a city library.
For the fiscally conservative city
councilors, transferring the 5.95 mills collected by the county to
city coffers was a wash. But getting the city out from under a
potential $18 million bond levy for a new county library in
Kalispell was even a bigger plus, and on Oct. 18, the council voted
unanimously to form an independent city library.