Keep planning process open, fair

Inter Lake editorial

The Lakeside and Somers neighborhood planning processes seem to have moved from controversial to explosive last week.

It's been a volatile month for planning in the Flathead Lake communities, starting with a Somers neighborhood plan meeting that was disrupted to the point where sheriff's deputies had to be called in. Now school officials have banned the neighborhood group from meeting there, for fear of property damage "or other retribution."

Then the Lakeside planning effort got a black eye for operating a members-only Yahoo group Web site that apparently was an exclusive tool for planning committee members. The private site, which the county planning staff also used, was ordered shut down last week by the County Attorney's Office.

Now a lawsuit filed by two dozen Somers and Lakeside landowners threatens to undo not only both of those planning efforts but future neighborhood planning efforts as well. The suit asks the court to grant an injunction stopping the Somers planning process and asks that the Lakeside plan be declared illegal and unconstitutional.

The clincher is the lawsuit's request for an injunction stopping County Planning Director Jeff Harris and Flathead County from pursuing the development of any future neighborhood plan until the court declares an appropriate process.

For the sake of any future planning in the Flathead, county officials need to act quickly to consider ways to make the process more transparent and assure that everyone has a seat at the table when draft plans are being discussed.

Although members of the Lakeside committee believe their private Web site was an effective tool in the early stages of their neighborhood planning effort, its members-only status excluded people and that was wrong. Both opponents and supporters must be included in the process from beginning to end.

And obviously procedures for neighborhood plans outlined in the county's growth policy need to be better defined, particularly when it comes to establishing a "clear majority" of support for a plan. If petitions are the best way of gauging support of property owners, then perhaps an amendment to the growth policy is in order, calling for petitions up front instead of allowing them after-the-fact to protest a plan.

The whole point of neighborhood plans is neighbors coming together to reach a consensus about how their area should be developed in the future. They're nonbinding recommendations that planning boards and the commissioners can draw from to make land-use recommendations and decisions.

Such planning efforts should be bringing folks together, not dividing them to the point of unruly meetings and lawsuits. The ball is in the county's court to fix the process so everyone can be a player.