County turns to residents for input

Get the refreshments ready: Kootenai County wants to have a meeting in your living room.

The county commission is paying a Colorado consulting firm $82,000 to help get every resident possible involved in rewriting the county’s comprehensive plan, the blueprint for how the area will grow.

That means throwing out the traditional idea of forming a committee to rewrite the plan and present it to the public for comment.

Instead, the firm Kezziah Watkins of Colorado Springs wants to survey county residents and encourage anyone with interest in how the area should or shouldn’t grow to host a meeting with their friends and neighbors. Living rooms, businesses, churches and coffee klatches are all possible locations for the gatherings.

“We want specifics that can translate into the comprehensive plan,” said Tweed Kezziah. Kezziah and business partner Susan Watkins have been helping towns and counties hash out growth plans, budgets and strategic goals for 15 years.

Kezziah said people who live in high growth areas in the West, such as Kootenai County, want to understand how the population increase will affect their everyday lives.

The county is expecting great interest in the plan rewrite, especially because neighborhood groups from Athol to Harrison have banded together in the last year to fight proposals for large developments in rural areas. Just last week more than 350 people attended a public hearing on a proposed exclusive golf resort on a former 600-acre cattle ranch overlooking Moscow Bay. But the commission also wanted to ensure that other residents – people who likely would never attend a planning meeting – have a way to get involved.

Kezziah Watkins developed the concept of a “meeting in a box” – a kit with instructions on how to have an in-home meeting that provides discussion questions and worksheets that are returned to the county. That’s one of the reasons why the commission chose the firm from among 12 applicants. The meeting kits likely won’t be available until August.

“I think it’s a much more opportunistic way to get some different views,” said Commissioner Katie Brodie, who was involved in the last rewrite of the comprehensive plan 12 years ago. “That’s what is different.”

County Planner Mark Mussman said the last comprehensive plan committee met every Monday for 18 months and debated grammar and punctuation. When it was ready to offer a proposed plan to the public, residents felt they had no ownership in the process. The same happened when the county redid the rules for dividing land in the county.

Once the surveys, available in August, are complete and residents have had nearly 50 in-home meetings, the consultants will have two at-large gatherings using the “meeting in a box” format. Those are scheduled for Sept. 26 and 27.

Then the firm will compile a report that it will present to the county commission in December.

That’s when the county planning staff and the county Planning Commission will start turning residents’ comments into provisions of the comprehensive plan. After the draft is finished, the public will have another chance to comment.

A final document is expected by August 2007.

Kezziah and Watkins are in town until Tuesday meeting individually with a wide range of people who have shown interest in the comprehensive plan, from real estate agents and developers to members of anti-growth groups and the Coeur d’Alene Tribe.

Initially Kootenai Environmental Alliance, which has been encouraging the public to gear up for the growth plan change for several years, wasn’t invited for an interview. Barry Rosenberg was concerned that the process was exclusionary. After hearing his concerns Friday, Rosenberg was squeezed in for a meeting and had fewer reservations.

“We encourage people to participate,” he said. “We just hope the planning department really reflects what the (residents) say.”

Some people, including Independent county commission candidate Tom Macy, think the current comprehensive plan is good but that the commission never followed it. He worries that the rewrite will “rip the guts out of what’s there.”

Watkins said people are always skeptical, and that’s why they should get involved.

“All we are asking is for them to give it a chance,” Watkins said, adding that people who help create the growth plan become the watchdogs who ensure elected officials follow it.

For more information, call the county Planning Department at (208) 446-1070.