Land-use plans fight easements in Swan

Where development should occur and what land should be used for are the pressing questions facing the Swan Valley Community Council as they take on the daunting task of re-vamping their 10-year development plan.

Community council and planning board member Ken Donovan said looking toward a future where conservation easements could take up more land in the Swan makes it harder for the planning board to do its job.

“We could work for six months on developing a plan for an area and find out that an easement has been put in place,” Donovan said.

One of the concerns Donovan has is having a lack of developable land for his community to grow into. Without it, he feels the community he lives in, which has already lost jobs and people to the economic slowdown, will vanish.

“A lot of our young people have moved away because there’s not a lot of work around here,” Donovan said. “About 10 years ago there was 130 (businesses) and now there are about half that.”

Currently only seven percent of the land in the Swan is developable. The rest is taken up by protected wilderness areas, state land and wetland habitat that is difficult to build on.

John Keller of Clearwater Montana Properties Inc. said of that 25,000 acres of available private acreage in the Swan, about 25 percent is under conservation easements and can’t be developed any further than it already is.

Easements are like partial land purchases. The private property owner often retains most of the rights to their land, but relinquishes rights such as subdivision and further development of the land through the sale of the easement.

Donovan said often times the greater community is the last to know about conservation easements that have taken place.

The Swan Valley Community Council is one of several rural district advisory councils within Missoula County. The council works as a liaison between the community and county commissioners.

Donovan and four other council members were elected to speak for an area of the county that covers a 17-mile stretch along highway 83 from the Missoula/Lake County line to the Summit out to the wilderness areas on either side of it. It’s approximately 236,000 acres of land that contains about 450 eligible voters.

“What we want to do,” Donovan said. “Is try to lay out a plan for 10 years that will allow for growth —reasonable, common-sense growth — and still protect the wildlife areas and allow people to do some building that they maybe weren’t able to before.”

Available land

A big reason so much land is unavailable for development is because of the 63,000-acre Plum Creek land sale to The Nature Conservancy as part of the Legacy Project in 2010.

“Which is about 100-square miles and that is a pretty remarkable number. It’s just 100-square miles of private property that won’t ever exist again,” Keller said. “If Plum Creek just doled it out a little bit at a time it would have lasted us forever.”

Before the large land sale, Plum Creek had already sold about 5,000 acres to private land-owners. Sale to private land-owners helps create jobs through construction of new homes.

Most of The Legacy Project land has since been sold to the Forest Service and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. The Nature Conservancy’s goal for that land was to keep it available for public resource use and recreation and protect valuable wildlife corridors for animals like grizzly bears.

Conservation Easements

A plan to purchase 11,000 acres worth of conservation easements in the Swan Valley was already in the works when The Legacy Project land changed hands in 2010.

The Fish and Wildlife Service was looking to weave the land into easements through the Benton Lake Wildlife Refuge Complex Draft Management Plan, which covers over 200,000 acres of land in 10 counties and straddles both sides of the continental divide.

The Swan River National Wildlife Refuge southeast of Condon is one of the parcels of land covered by the Benton Lake plan. The plan looks to add something called the Swan Valley Conservation Area to the list of land in the management plan.

FWS met with the Swan Valley Community Council twice, once in 2010 before the Legacy sale and again in May of 2012, to inform them of the plan and talk about the best way to go about acquiring the land.

“What we realized quickly was that there was confusion about what we were trying to get input on,” said project leader of the refuge complex Kathleen Burchett.

Burchett said the council asked the FWS to halt the purchase of conservation easements in the Swan until they could get some sort of development plan into place. This is something Burchett said is not possible because the wheels for the project were set into motion two years ago.

The purpose of the project is to keep land intact and protect areas for bull trout, migrating birds and corridors open for grizzlies.

If the money is available, Burchett said FWS plans on purchasing conservation easements on 5,000 acres in the Swan over the next 15 years.

But there are some concerns Burchett said FWS might be able to work with the community council.

“They wanted us to take a look at how much conservation in the Swan is enough and they wanted us to be more involved in the community and they wanted us to proceed slowly and deliberately with our conservation easements,” Burchett said. “And we plan on addressing those concerns in the (management plan) proposal.”

The proposal should be out for comment later this winter. In the meantime the FWS in conjunction with the Swan Ecosystem Center has assigned Scott Eggeman as a liaison between all the affected parties.

Land-use plans

Eggeman regularly attends community council meetings and is involved with the planning board.

“What I hear is this is a group that has a lot of concerns,” Eggeman said. “They care a lot about this community and its future.”

Eggeman sees his role as someone who’s able to provide information to the council and answer any questions they might have. He said he’s trying to help with the growth planning process and sees what the council is trying to do as a good thing for the community.

Donovan said he was grateful when Eggeman started attending meetings and that he’s been really great for communication.

“It’s getting a little better, it’s becoming a little more transparent,” Donovan said.

Unfortunately the Benton Lake Wildlife Refuge Project isn’t the only project with easement plans for the Swan Valley. There is also Missoula County, which has money set aside specifically for easement and conservation use within the county. There’s also the State Land Trust and the Montana Land Reliance.

As the planning board proceeds with creating their 10-year development plan, they want to be kept in the loop, so they can work with organizations like FWS to figure out which areas would be good for development and which areas would be good for conservation easements.

One of the changes the board hopes to make to the current zoning for parcels of land is to change the amount of acreage that can be purchased from 40 acres, which limits the people who can move into the area based on income, to 1-acre parcels.

Those 1-acre parcels would be clustered in certain areas where the planning board wants to promote growth, and there would still be larger tracts of land and open space in other areas.

Ex-community council member Larry Dunham said whatever happens, the people of the Swan need to be just as important as wildlife and protecting habitat.

Donovan agrees and points to the fact that their school is in danger of not existing for much longer because of enrollment numbers and funding.

“If the school goes the valley’s going to die,” Donovan said. “Without youth, there’s nothing. It’s just going to slowly rot away.”