Bonner County tackles land use

Bonner County is in the middle of a land rush and its primary planning document that guides development is 26 years old.

That document, the comprehensive plan, is being updated and the new version is nearing adoption by the County Commissioners.

On Thursday, the commissioners will consider the most controversial component of the plan, which addresses how land can be used in the county.

The intense interest in real estate in the county and the skyrocketing values has local residents and developers worried over the future land use designations.

According to the Bonner County Assessor, last year the county’s total property valuation was about $3 billion. Now it’s about $4 billion.

In May, the county planning department had processed 157 building location permits more than it had in the entire year of 2004. An estimated 1,500 building location permits will be issued this year. Meanwhile, subdivision applications and zoning requests have increased 150 percent from last year.

“We’ve been discovered,” said Bonner County Planner Clare Marley. “We’ve been on everybody’s front page lately. It’s difficult when it comes to doing good planning.”

During neighborhood meetings leading up to the land use portion of the plan, residents expressed concerns about sprawl, strip development and leap-frogging growth, Marley said.

“The whole plan is designed to prevent that and direct that to the population centers,” she said.

However, now that the proposed new land use designations and map have been released to the public, developers and some other land owners are concerned that it might be too restrictive.

Under the existing plan, the majority of the county is designated as rural, which allows for a minimum lot size of 5 acres. Agricultural zones now allow for a minimum lot size of 10 acres.

Under the proposed plan, new zones are proposed for remote, roadless areas where minimum lot sizes would be 40 acres; for prime timber and agricultural lands, where the minimum lot size would be 20 acres; and agricultural and forest lands, where the minimum lot size would be 10 to 20 acres.

The county’s farmers and cattle ranchers are advocating the larger minimum lot sizes because they’re worried about the loss of prime agricultural land to development.

In a letter to the county, the Wood V Bar Ranch family, which raises cattle for beef production, noted that the agricultural crop land in Bonner County decreased by 32 percent from 1992 to 2002.

“The open green spaces or agricultural districts of Bonner County are being sacrificed and destroyed by urban sprawl and development,” the family wrote.

Nationwide, according to the Natural Resource and Conservation Service, more than a million acres of farmland are being lost to development each year.

But critics of the new land use designations say they may result in raising property values even more and making the dream of owning a home in the country unaffordable to many.

“Local developers want to see more area for expansion of growth, and more areas opened up,” Marley said.

The Bonner County Commission meeting begins at 6 p.m. Thursday at Sandpoint Community Hall.

Written comments on the land use plan were accepted through July 6.

The meeting is not a public hearing, which means that public testimony is not scheduled. However, commissioners could vote to reopen public testimony.

Information on the proposed comprehensive plan is available online at http://www.co.bonner.id.us/planning/.