Missoula News

Interview

New Missoula Planning Director Outlines 3-Part Plan for Growth

By Stefanie Kilts, 3-15-07

With the recreational amenities, wilderness areas, and educational and cultural opportunities in Missoula, Roger Millar knew when he first began work at the Office of Planning and Grants last January that this city was a very special place.

As the new OPG director, Millar has made it priority to preserve the high quality of life that drew him to the city in the first place.

In Missoula, Millar explained, a person can drive twenty minutes and enjoy world-class recreational amenities in a wilderness area and then drive back to sip a latte at a “cool college-town coffee shop.”

“You just can’t do that in Aspen,” Millar said.

Millar will talk about the challenges in keeping those unique values of Missoula intact at the City Club Forum Friday. His speech, “Preserving Quality of Life in the Face of Growth: Lessons Learned in Other Communities,” will touch on code revision, housing challenges and city-county cooperation in the urbanizing areas and his “toolbox of ideas” he has gathered from other Western cities.

Millar said he will stress at the forum that people are too quick to point out the city’s flaws. “Many other places would love to have Missoula’s problems,” he said. However, Millar pinpointed three ways to handle growth.

First on Millar’s list is regulatory reform and code revision for the city. When Millar started working at the Office of Planning and Grants, he was surprised that the Missoula City Zoning Ordinance, a document establishing the city’s zoning ordinances, was written in 1972 and has since had a huge number of amendments added. Millar said there have been two unsuccessful attempts to change Missoula’s codes but he said, “Until we make changes, it [the city’s codes] will be a boat anchor, holding us back from progress.”

He said a part of that regulatory reform is working on the relationship between the city and county and establishing the line between the city limits and the county lines while preserving the rural livelihoods on the outskirts.

Secondly, Millar wants to see Missoula implement a long-range transportation plan. “We need to consider land use and land patterns in the next transportation plan,” Millar. The drawing up of the next plan should start in the summer of 2008, he said.

For the new plan, Millar said the city needs to evaluate what the goal for transportation in the city is: to simply provide a social service for people who have no other way to travel in Missoula or to create a viable transportation system that many people in the community use.

The third thing Millar wants to see in Missoula is the addition of more affordable housing. With the average family in Missoula able to afford between a $150,000 and $180,000 home and the median home price at $210,000, Millar says there is a great disconnect in the housing market.

“There is really no silver bullet on affordable housing,” Millar said, but the first step is to identify who the city is serving. There may be housing for lower-income families but working families may be the people left without adequate housing.

There are definite downsides to being discovered, Millar said, and that is seen through the influx of higher income homeowners buying their vacation homes in Missoula and increasing house prices for the rest of the citizens.

Millar explained that when a town is discovered, it has a tendency “to turn itself inside out”, moving people, shops, school, and churches to the periphery. “Are we going to put our workers on the outside looking in or are we going to build a city with the workers inside?” Millar said.

One reason the housing is so expensive in the city, Millar said, is that we try to fit everything into a “one size fits all model.” The standard housing unit in Missoula is a single-family, detached home on five acres with a multi-car garage, he explained.

Millar said the main housing question for the Missoula area is can the city build attractive, affordable apartments and high-rise condos?

“Some people come to the West for reasons other then mowing a lawn,” Millar said. These are the people who would buy or rent multiple-unit housing. The city should provide options for people who don’t want a lawn and for people who do, Millar explained.

Millar says he believes there are many tools to use to create more housing including among others incentives for builders encouraging different housing options, allowing more density within the city and creating a housing trust.

In regard to identifying certain sections of Missoula the city needs to work on, Millar said there are the “areas of stability” and the “areas of change.” It is not necessary to change the entire city, Millar said. The areas that are stable can be left alone but when change in an area makes sense, the city needs to provide the tools for the people in those neighborhoods.

When discussing the future growth of Missoula, the term “smart growth” has been thrown around to describe good communities and when asked about the true definition, Millar said the term has become dependent on how the person saying it wants to use it. But for Millar, the “popsicle test” proves to be a useful indicator of a viable and healthy city.

The “popsicle test” is composed of five different questions designed to rate a city’s smart growth consistencies. First is the “popsicle test” asking “Can you walk home before the popsicle melts?” Next is the “the smooth test” posing the question “Would you feel safe enough to walk through the city with your date?” The next two questions are the “children test”—asking “Is a place big enough to allow children see the world around them?” and the “senior test”—asking “Are seniors engaged and active participants in the community?” Finally the “commons test” asks “Will natural resources sufficiently replenish for future generations’ use?”

“I’m an optimist,” Millar said, referring to Missoula’s future on handling growth “or I just have the advantage of not having gone through everything everyone else has [in the Office of Planning and Grants].”

Millar said the conversation for smart planning and growth in Missoula needs to get started by assessing what tools the city and county has to use and what tools they need to get. He hopes to facilitate that conservation through the meeting tomorrow.

Prior to working in Missoula, Millar was the former deputy city manager in McCall, Idaho. Millar was also a professional planner and engineer for eight years in Portland, Oregon.

Millar said he like the small town feel of McCall but found it was a bit isolated and when his child read all the books in the McCall’s school library, he decided it was time to move to a bigger city with more opportuntities.

There is really not a single thing that makes Missoula unique but it is “just a lot of good things and when you add them together, you are put in a really great spot,” Millar said.

Millar explained that the bar of standards needs to be set high for Missoula’s future growth in order to preserve the city’s unique values. “People are coming and we need to be ready for them,” he said.

The City Club Forum will be held on Friday, March 16 at 11:30 a.m. in the Governer’s Room at the Florence Building. For more information, go to the City Club’s website at www.cityclubmissoula.org.

Correction: This story has been altered to correct the original publish date of Missoula’s zoning ordinances.

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