Ravalli County Gets New Subdivision Regs With Key Change For Planning Efforts

By Greg Lemon, 11-20-06

Ravalli County commissioners adopted revisions to their subdivision regulations Monday and the changes included a significant move toward long-range planning.

Now, instead of having the county Planning Board hold public hearings and review subdivision applications, that duty will fall directly to the county commissioners.

The subdivision regulations revisions were due Oct. 1, and for the past several weeks, the revisions have been a top priority for a swamped Ravalli County planning office. Two weeks ago, the commissioners and planning board had a joint meeting to discuss the revisions. That meeting was continued until Monday.

The change in direction for the planning board is welcome, said board chairman Dan Huls.

With the amount of growth the county is experiencing, the planning board has become more like a subdivision review board, Huls said.

The whole idea with a planning board was to look into the future and try and advise the county on how it should plan for growth, Huls said. That responsibility has been sacrificed in favor of the tedious subdivision review duty.

Recently, the Planning Board, the members of which are all volunteer, held several lengthy meetings and worked for months on the Aspen Springs subdivision. The board eventually recommended the county commissioners deny the subdivision, which they did and now the developers of Aspen Springs are suing the county over that decision.

During the process of reviewing Aspen Springs, the planning board was swamped with hundreds of pages of documentation detailing the complex components of the subdivision’s plan, recommendations by the planning department and arguments for and against the subdivision.

Then the commissioners had to go through the same documentation and considered it along with the recommendations of the planning board and planning department.

Under the new subdivision regulations the process would be less repetitive. The county commissioners will hold one public hearing on a subdivision, taking public comment. That one meeting can extend for as long as necessary to receive all the appropriate information and comments, but the hope is by allowing developers and the public to address the county commissioners directly through the entire process, things will become more efficient, said commissioner Greg Chilcott.

“The priority has got to be planning,” Chilcott said Monday.

While he’s not looking forward to the increased workload this change will ultimately mean for the commissioners, he feels it’s the right move to get the county more focused on long-range planning. Besides, planning is exactly why the planning board was established.

“We’re going to use that expertise to try and get in front of the planning curve,” he said.

Huls is looking forward to the opportunity to focus on planning. It was the reason he applied to be on the board in the first place.

The Ravalli County Planning board already has a subcommittee focused on long-range planning. Huls expects that subcommittee to continue, but now they’ll be used more actively to inform the entire board.

Even though the planning board won’t have the same role in subdivision review, the commissioners are going to look to them for consultation on some subdivisions, he said. That means, the first thing the board must do is figure out how to set up a clear system to advise the commissioners when needed.

Changes to the structure of subdivision review and approval weren’t the only revisions to Ravalli County’s subdivision regulations. The other revisions dealt with the details of the subdivision application process. The two public meetings to review the revisions drew several comments from local developers and engineers who are intimately familiar with the process.

The revisions were based largely on the model subdivision regulations adopted by the Montana Associations of Counties to assist counties in the revision process, said Karen Hughes, Ravalli County Planning director.




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