Strip Along Highway 41 Rejected Post Falls-Rathdrum Corridor Needs A Plan

A proposal to make 6,400 acres of bluegrass fields available for commercial development was too much too soon for Kootenai County’s land-use cops.

County planning commissioners Monday rejected a plan to designate a quartermile-wide swath along Highway 41 between Post Falls and Rathdrum as a place for retail and industrial business.

Technically, the proposal would only have changed a few lines on a planning map that shows how the county should someday look.

But the appointed board members feared such a dramatic change would lead to hodge-podge development before the community had decided how it wanted that area to grow.

“That was just too large an undertaking,” Commissioner Katie Brodie said.

“Sixty-four hundred acres … that’s monumental.”

The proposal came at the request of area landowners and would have included all but one mile of the lonely six-mile stretch of state road between the two towns.

That one mile is owned by Wayne and Karleen Meyer, grass farmers who said they did not want their rural prairie land to become a busy street with stop lights at every block.

“I think it’s great,” said Karleen Meyer.

“I think one Highway 95 in this county is sufficient, don’t you?” That, Brodie said, was one of the unresolved issues that led her colleagues to make their decision.

“What does Highway 41 want to be when it grows up?” she said.

“It would be nice if Post Falls, Rathdrum and the county could get together and figure that out first.”

It’s not clear yet whether that road should be a busy stop-and-start commercial corridor like East Sprague Avenue in Spokane or an efficient highway without stoplights, like Interstate 90, said Collin Coles, a planner with the city of Post Falls.

But the state did not earmark that road long ago as one designed for unbroken travel, said Jim Stravens, a planning consultant who represented the landowners. And since it didn’t, landowners now have a right to develop it like Highway 95.

It’s almost unavoidable, he said. “Commerce naturally wants to go where high traffic volume is,” he said.

The board’s action merely serves as a recommendation to county commissioners, who will make their own decision in coming weeks.

But Stravens said he might not continue the process that long.

“I don’t know what our next move is,” he said.

“They (planning commissioners) said it was a good idea but now isn’t the time. I’m still trying to figure out when would be a good time to plan your vision for the future.”

, DataTimes