For all the warmth with which the Spokane community embraces Fairchild Air Force Base – especially when the Pentagon is considering base closures – there are unavoidable tensions over some aspects of side-by-side existence.

A high-profile example occurred two years ago when a developer-friendly county building official signed off on a child-care center in a crash zone by Fairchild Air Force Base. Other cases occur more frequently but with less publicity when residents near the air base complain that noise from passing aircraft rattles their windows or scares their pets.

The more that population grows and development spreads into the outlying areas of the community, the greater the chances of conflict between military and civilian land uses.

The problem exists not just in Spokane County but across the country, especially where military installations were established at relatively remote sites that have since been encroached upon by residential and commercial patterns. To mitigate concerns, the Defense Department came up with a process, now under way on the West Plains, called a joint land use study.

When complete – in about a year if the experiences in other communities hold true – the plan will give city and county governments in the area a set of land-use proposals to guide planning and zoning policies. Exactly how the various local governments follow up is hard to predict, although the state’s Growth Management Act strongly encourages that the sources of conflict between a community and its military base be managed to avoid problems.

In July, the Spokane County Planning Department hosted a workshop where community members could study maps of Fairchild and the surrounding area, including designated problem areas such as crash zones. Another is expected after a steering committee drafts preliminary findings, probably in about a month.

Actually, an earlier joint land use study was conducted at Fairchild in the 1990s, although Jim Falk, the county planner involved in the current process, says he’s found no evidence that it was implemented. But Fairchild’s mission has changed since then (the B-52s are gone), meaning the impact of base activities on the surrounding community has changed, too.

And missions could be further affected by such unknowns as whether the Air Force’s next generation of refueling tankers will be stationed here.

Meanwhile, Spokane International Airport is working on its own decision about the alignment of a third runway there, even though it may be 15 or 20 years before it’s needed. Besides being an essential element for the joint land use study project at Fairchild, that information will enable local governments to shape planning decisions now to avoid problems down the road.

Processes like these are far from riveting, but for community officials, as well as community residents, getting the planning done right now forestalls land-use compatibility problems that could make Fairchild and its sizeable economic impact a base-closure victim somewhere down the road.