Prairie land is falling fast to developers

Attempts to save large expanses of public open space on the Rathdrum Prairie are dead.

By most accounts that means the remaining bluegrass fields and other farmland soon will be covered with homes and businesses ranging from retail mini-marts to light industrial parks.

Yet local planners aren’t quite ready to write the obituary for the area’s pastoral pocket that’s become a visual landmark. Some hold out hope for creative ways to manage development so smaller chunks of green space remain and so the prairie towns of Post Falls, Rathdrum and Hayden can keep their individual identities without becoming a sprawl of vinyl-sided homes with asphalt shingles.

“We need to awaken people’s imagination rather than focus on how many acres to keep from being developed,” said Collin Coles, a Post Falls senior planner. “If you start thinking about the pressure and time left – that can cripple your motivation.”

Between 3,000 and 4,000 acres of open space remain, not counting smaller undeveloped chunks of patchwork land between current developments. Each year about 1,000 acres is eaten up by the surrounding cities – mostly for large-lot residential developments.

Coles said it’s inevitable that the prairie soon will disappear because the influxes of people moving here need a place to live. The record-pace growth spurt began more than a decade ago, largely attributed to the area’s natural beauty and quality of life.

Many see the Rathdrum Prairie as a component of those traits. But Coles said the prairie also is optimal development ground because it’s flat and close to several towns, the lakes and mountains.

The challenge is coming up with a vision – and land-use laws – that will preserve some pieces of the prairie, whether it’s with parks and bike paths or large fields the cities will irrigate with treated wastewater. Prairie preservation – even in a reduced or redefined form – would help protect the Spokane Valley/Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer that flows below and maintain a sense of the area’s once-rural character.

“If we do things right we have the potential to have a really neat community here,” said local Realtor Brad Jordon, who also serves on the Coeur d’Alene Planning Commission. “It’s not going to be anything we all agree is perfect. We just have to find those common threads.”

Before the Rathdrum Prairie Open Space Committee can get too far along with creating that vision, it must finish a sewer study that will show how much wastewater the area can handle. That in turn will determine how many houses the prairie can sustain, said Hayden Community Development Director Lisa Key.

“We have some real potential in the next year to 18 months to finally have an implementation plan in place for how we might approach whatever sort of potential preservation we might be able to achieve,” Key said.

Those potential planning tools include clustering homes together and requiring developers to leave patches of green space, requiring parks and pathways and making sure there’s connectivity between developments so they aren’t closed-off subdivisions full of cul-de-sacs and 6-foot fences.

There also are more complex tools, such as transferring development rights. For example, a prairie farmer could sell the development rights to his bluegrass fields. The person who buys those rights could then use them to add density to a development on a different piece of land already within the city limits. That way the farmer would get paid for the land’s development potential while keeping his property in agricultural production. The developer would have a way to build more homes or businesses without consuming more farmland.

The only thing that’s for certain is there isn’t the money – or the desire by elected officials – to buy large expanses of prairie land for public open space.

“This whole thing comes down to dollars and what people are willing to spend to preserve the prairie,” Kootenai County Commission Chairman Gus Johnson said. “More and more, cities and counties come under the crunch of just trying to provide daily services. That means those other dollars are less and less available to utilize for this preservation issue.”

Last year there was a spark of optimism that counties could eventually use sales tax revenue to buy open space. Local lawmakers lobbied to change state law so the local-option tax could go toward projects other than jails. A November 2004 advisory ballot – pushed by then-County Commission Chairman Dick Panabaker – reaffirmed that effort when 55 percent of the voters said the half-cent sales tax should go for open space. The other option listed on the ballot – a civic center – got 45 percent of the vote.

But the idea died when Panabaker lost his re-election bid and the Idaho Legislature refused to expand the local-option sales tax to pay for big-ticket projects other than jails.

Since then the prairie committee has switched gears and is focusing on forming a consensus on what prairie development should look like and how to craft zoning, subdivision and other land-use ordinances to make it happen.

“I’m disgusted with the whole thing,” said Kootenai County Planning Director Rand Wichman, who bemoans the fact there likely won’t be much public open space on the prairie. “To me we had tremendous potential to really do something great for this community. I think it’s over. But I may be among the most pessimistic.”

Wally Meyer, an open space committee member and bluegrass farmer, said it’s the same story all across the West where farmland is being lost to rooftops. He said nothing can be done to stop it unless elected officials make it a priority.

“Right now they have a lot of fish to fry and open space isn’t one of them,” Meyer said.

Yet he’s glad the committee is working to figure out some way to save at least some patches of green – even if there is no longer any hope for a larger preservation effort.

Carol Sebastian of the Kootenai Environmental Alliance isn’t giving up so easily.

“It’s a defeatist attitude just to give up, especially when we have tools out there,” Sebastian said. “None of it is new. It’s all out there. It’s just adapting it to this area.”