North Lake moves ahead with draft proposal

The North Lake County Planning and Zoning Committee spoke with Lake County Planning and Zoning Director Joel Nelson to review the changes they made to their re-zoning proposal on June 1 at Glacier Sotheby’s in Bigfork.

The reason the committee has been working on the proposal since 2004 is because they want north Lake County to retain as much of its character as possible. This is to meet the needs and desires of north Lake County residents who made their voices heard at public meetings last fall.

Committee chair Leslie Budewitz said they used East Shore as a model.

“East Shore is our best example when people say they don’t want zoning and want things to stay the same,” Budewitz said.

Complications arose while forming the waterfront residential section of their proposal because there are hundreds of parcels of land and they had to meet legal requirements as well as keep community requests in mind. This was also the case for home occupation regulations.

“We want to do what the community wants,” Budewitz said. “We looked at what other districts have done (with home occupations regulations) and looked at what the community wanted and went with what they wanted.”

She also said they are trying to avoid becoming “too nit-picky” with their proposal in order to follow what the community wants.

Part of their plan includes regulations that prevent commercial development that would cause significant increases in traffic for the Woodsbay and north Lake County areas.

While doing what the community wants may sound simple, committee vice chair Paul Rana pointed out that public feedback has been that residents don’t want to be told what to do, but at the same time the consensus was there was too much heavy traffic already.

During their meeting they completed their review of the current final draft regulations with Nelson. This included density provisions and outlined the steps necessary for moving forward.

Now the committee is in the process of finalizing planning and zoning regulations. After that, they will send them to Nelson for review and he will give further comments.

Then the committee will combine the approval of the regulations with a color-coded map at a public meeting. No official date is set for the public meeting to review the proposal and take comments, but the earliest estimated date is for early August since Nelson’s review will take some time and then the committee will need to set up a meeting place and advertise the meeting.

After the public meeting, the committee will file a formal application for a technical review with the Lake County Planning Department. Then, the planning department will send notices to the public before having a planning board review.

Once the planning board has reviewed the proposal it will be sent to the Lake County Commissioners for review, and then there will be a protest period. If the proposal passes through the protest period with insufficient protest, the commissioners will vote on it.

“We owe the public one final informal meeting,” Rana said. “Our final chapter with that map will allow the community to see the same formal map so they will have a preview of what they (the commissioners) will see.”

For more information, go to the North Lake County website at www.bigfork steering.org or call Leslie Budewitz at 837-6094 or Paul Rana at 837-1102.