Webmaster's NoteStephan Herbaly, now a democracy officer for the U.S. State Department working in Europe and Africa, headed the planning office for Flathead County through the early 1990's. His tenure coincided with an epic battle between proponents of land use planning and an anti-planning, anti-regulation, anti-government, mostly rural, old guard -- a battle that the old guard won. Herbably's reflections on the Flathead's predicament were published first in the Bigfork Eagle newspaper. We are pleased to republish them here. PDF version for printing.73 KB.
I started to write this article nine years ago in western Hungary just after I had left the Flathead Valley and local government planning. At the time, I had titled the narrative, "Planner's Failure: A Flathead Case Study." In hindsight, the situation was a failure of a community to come together rather than any one person's failure. Could I have done more? Probably. Would it have mattered? I do not know. Maybe the future will be different. Several things prompted me to write this. First was a short e-mail from the Flathead bureau chief of the Missoula Independent saying that my "old opposition" was at it again, wanting to stop land use planning and regulation. The second was an e-mail from the Flathead Land Trust announcing its 20-year anniversary. Third was the content of a couple of pro-ranchette articles in the High Country News justifying the author's choice of residential environment. I sent an e-mail reply to the Missoula reporter and told him he could call me either in Budapest where I was on R&R or in Abuja, Nigeria, where I now work as a Democracy Officer in the Foreign Service, but did not hear back from him. It got me thinking, however, and after 10 years away I've decided to recap events and try once more to make a difference.
During my 15 years as a land use planner in the United States, I had many opportunities to discuss people's dreams and motivation for land use and land investment decisions. There is little actual long-range planning that goes on in local government planning offices, and planners spend a significant amount of their time simply providing information and comment on proposals for land development. In rural areas of the Rocky Mountain West such as Flathead County, if there is a land use policy plan, it is usually a set of vague generalities about goals for the future. It may contain some ideas about preservation, unless of course this preservation happens to keep John or Jane Doe from doing whatever they want with the land. The result is usually that there is little to no regulation, and substandard developments expand uncontrollably with no real services or infrastructure. Montana is a land of dreams, some are sweet, some are nightmares. Many of the dreams that people arrive in Montana with are fantasies based on one summer trip through Yellowstone or a drive over the Going-to-the-Sun Road with little understanding of the complex and at times severe nature of the place. Once they are back home in Dubuque, they look out at the neighbor's dumpster and decide that Montana is the place for them. "Land of the free!" "Wide-open county!" "No regulation!" "Hell, it is my land I can do what I want." My favorite investors were those who bought their 20-acre tract, sight unseen, out of the back of a sport or fishing magazine. Other dreamers are attracted by the beauty and majesty of the country. They come with a sense of stewardship and responsibility for their impact upon the landscape. Many times these dreams are in direct conflict.
Outside of the incorporated cities in Montana, for the most part, there is no real land use planning and regulation. This is the case because, "Montanans want it that way." More than 20 years ago the Legislature voted to severely curtail planning law in the state. At the time it was seen as a victory to get rid of state bureaucracy, as few had the vision to realize what the future held. In reality, multiple tens of thousands of acres across Montana have been split into ranchettes of 20 acres or greater. Under Montana's subdivision law, each of those parcels is eligible for unregulated family member transfer. The end result has generally been what a friend of mine who lived in the Five Acre Tracts south of Livingston called "equestrian ghettos." Even 20 years ago when I was the Livingston planner, almost none of the Five Acre Tracts contained five acres due to unregulated land splits. Fifteen years ago there was at least the semblance of a planning structure in Flathead County. The Regional Development office where I was planning director coordinated three city-county planning offices and the county planning board's work outside extra jurisdictional areas of the city-county boards. After the collapse of an innovative, citizens-driven effort to develop a growth management plan and land use regulation in 1994-1995, the various jurisdictions have gone their own way. For a period, the regional development office was replaced by the Tri-city planning office, but things degenerated further and now even that unraveled. The county has its own planning staff, the cities of Whitefish and Kalispell have one planner and Columbia Falls has a part-time planner. My personal assessment was that the three elected officials that made up the Board of Commissioners wanted to distance themselves from the cities that wanted planning and regulation to retain the 'values' of the valley. At the time the board was composed of a retired driver's license tester, a hair dresser and a road grader operator who had no applicable education. The grader operator swept into office at the head of an anti-building permit faction funded by real estate interest and ultra right wing property rights advocates. The Citizen's Plan failed for lack of vision and courage among the elected officials. Building permits were out and soon after so was I as planning director. In hindsight, the beautician was the best of the lot. She knew how to listen and could make up her own mind based upon the merits of the issues presented. An interested reader can go to the archives of the High Country News and read an excellent summary of those events at the time written by Florence Williams in the Western Roundup titled "Land-use Plan is Disemboweled." The County Commission form of government was developed and worked well when the biggest decision to be made was which stretch of the county's two farm-to-market gravel roads was to be bladed that year and the biggest development on the horizon was the REA project to bring electricity to the farm. In an era of multi-million dollar golf course residential developments and ski resort expansions, the time of the three-person populous commission is long past. County government has grown to be a multi-million dollar service delivery organization often with hundreds of employees. The situation calls for professional management (and dare I say it?) planning. If you owned the Flathead as a business, wouldn't you want to hire the best people to manage it? Recently in the Flathead Valley one of the Flathead County Commissioners, Joe Brenneman, had the strength of character to propose a moratorium on plan amendments until the county plan was updated, once again stirring up the anti-planning opposition. This moratorium would have suspended changes of land classification out of agriculture to more intensive land use categories. Perhaps leadership with vision is too much a threat to greed and myopic self interest. As I understand it, the current effort to update the County policy plan is going forward without the moratorium.
In the last several months I have been reading "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, author of "Guns, Germs and Steel." In his latest book, in his analysis of failed societies and economically unjustifiable land use schemes, he devotes large sections of the book to Montana -- the Bitterroot Valley and the Zortman Landusky mine in particular. In his analysis he develops five themes that he views as contributing to societal collapse. One of these themes that I find most troublesome -- and appropriate to the Flathead -- is modification of the natural environment by increasing population densities dependent upon transient weather or resource availability conditions. Specifically, the concern is the shift from agriculture and open space to low-density rural residential development. These low-density developments are especially dependent on petroleum based, private transportation networks that are of deep concern for the future. Physically the Flathead Valley, to paraphrase one of the valley's notable professors, is similar to a large stone bathtub filled up with gravel. Water comes in from the north from Glacier Park, the Bob Marshall and Great Bear Wildernesses. It drains to the south and exits from "the tub" at Polson in Lake County. The valley's communities are mostly perched on those gravel aquifers, and flush either treated or untreated sewer and septic discharge into the water flowing through the system. I use the term "community" in the broadest sense, in that as the valley has grown, the limits of the town borders have become blurred. Thousands of rural residents live (mostly on septic systems), work, shop and recreate over the whole of the valley floor as well as spilling out all the way to the Bitterroot Valley to the south. In many areas, it is only the volume of water moving through the aquifer system that keeps the septic discharge from fouling water for domestic use. While doing some Internet reading, I found the May 10, 2005, edition of the High Country News and came across articles written by ranchette dwellers praising and justifying their life style choices. Both of the writers were from Montana, one around Bozeman and the other south of Missoula. Both were very articulate in expressing their experience of what the geographer Yi Fu Tuan called topophilia, or the attachment we humans have to a physical place and our positive emotional relationship to it. We love the place that becomes our home, but at times our need to be occupying that special place outstrips the carrying capacity of the environment.
In January of 1986 I replaced Nick Verma as the planning director in the Flathead Regional Development Office. In my opinion, one of the reasons that he left the job was the inability to reconcile his vision for the valley with that of the elected officials from the municipalities. Rightly or wrongly, he had a vision of the valley floor built out, with ever-expanding urban residential density and dispersed commercial centers servicing this population. He wanted this. This led him to support the moving of Flathead Valley Community College out of Kalispell, the relocation of the post office out of the downtown, and other land use conversions hotly debated by the city fathers. During the late 1980s, the voices of conservation and supporters of planning had encouraged the development of neighborhood planning districts and the implementation of rural zoning districts outside of the city/county planning jurisdictions. Land use changes, "to protect the property rights of the owners," were cropping up just ahead of the planning and regulatory efforts. This cascading effect led to the proposal for Interim County Wide Zoning, so the valley would suspend development while the planning was to be done. Sound familiar? The opposition to planning and interim zoning joined the opposition developing against the county's adoption of a building-code-based permit system for residential construction. Initially, support for the permit system was galvanized due to the relocation and occupation of condemned houses from the incorporated cities in rural areas where there were no code restrictions. Ellen Perlman described this Flathead Valley opposition as part of a national trend in Governing magazine in an article titled "Property Rights: A Revolt Under Construction" (October 1995). By early 1992, opposition had grown to the point where confrontation between the warring factions appeared inevitable, and a referendum vote on the interim zoning was scheduled. Collectively we chose an alternative path.
When faced with a potential for a media battle between the supporters and opponents of planning, members of the county planning board and I met with representatives of the building trades, real estate profession and the vocal opponents of regulation to propose a different approach. Rather than waste our collective resources on media coverage for the various positions, I proposed that we approach the problem by creating a community-based citizens' group to write a plan for the future and recommend regulations to implement it. This was a non-traditional approach and it took a lot of trust on the part of the planning board to commit to allow a citizen committee to be in the driver's seat. The planning board was represented in the Cooperative Planning Coalition (CPC), but the coalition had control of the process. Together they raised half a million dollars, mostly from local landowners and businesses, and with county concurrence CPC hired a professional planning team, Aspen-based Design Workshop, to work with them to write the county plan. For the next two years the CPC worked to build local consensus, ultimately holding more than 200 public meetings. The plan that evolved ranged from encouraging protection of agricultural lands and open space, to recommending that approval of large subdivisions be contingent upon meeting set performance standards, including impact fees based upon anticipated community costs from the developments. These were "store-brand vanilla" recommendations and are broadly accepted standards nationally. Nothing proposed was unusual or represented grievous takings of property rights. At the end of the formal planning process the draft plan contained approximately 80 pages and was taken to a series of neighborhood meetings for review and comment. Opponents to planning came out in force at these meetings. The gloves were off. In reflecting on that time it is clear to me that the extreme negative voices of the polemic had come to dominate the public forum. I had good friends of planning tell me frankly that, "We like what you are doing but we will never come to a public meeting and accept verbal abuse like that again."
In a political environment where officials were elected on anti-planning and anti-regulation platforms, the future was not bright for the CPC planning effort. The local talk radio had a daily program providing opportunity for citizens to "speak out." The content, with virulent invective against planning and any kind of regulation, was the source of more than one physical threat against the planning staff and board members. By the end of the process, the CPC plan had been stripped down to a limp 17-page version of its former self, even that was ultimately rejected by the County Commissioners and shelved. This, in my opinion, continues to set the tone for a future that will haunt the valley. The false comfort for officials -- who act out the myth that they are responding to the voice of the people when that voice is just loudest, most long lasting and or most abrasive -- will be short lived. The Flathead Valley has been facing (or ignoring) the challenge of choosing their future reality for the last ten years. Valley residents need to realize that failure to plan is a choice in itself and will have dramatic environmental and tax consequences over time. For the last ten years I have been working in emerging democracies in central Europe, Asia and now Africa. The view from outside looking back has highlighted the precarious nature of the land use pattern and rural dispersed lifestyle so glorified in the United States and the American West in particular. The underlying reality is that as a nation we continue to relocate our population, especially retirees, to some of the most potentially inhospitable portions of our landscape -- the mountains and desert. We are committing to long term development patterns that have massive energy and water demands for the continued viability of these places as usable habitat. The Flathead Valley is a poster child in this trend. I may be just adding my voice to the din that is already being successfully ignored by mainstream America, but just because these communities think that they deserve to be subsidized at the peak of the world-wide resource consumption chain does not make it so. In the last month I have made two trips into the Niger River Delta of Nigeria (currently the source of 17 percent of U.S. domestic imports) to participate in meetings with citizens and officials whose decisions directly affect the price Americans pay at the pump while fueling inefficient vehicles. Believe me, there is no concern given to the thought of your continuing to be able to drive your Hummer over to Eagle Bend on cheap gas. Another book, The Geography of Nowhere, in reporting the voices of citizens facing the demise of their vanishing small town, has highlighted very neatly our tendency to believe that our perceptions of reality are permanent and that things "will always be this way". Denial of change is the easy route. The acceptance of change is fundamentally difficult, particularly if the change demanded impacts our perceived rights.
If you, through your elected officials, can not decide to regulate or stop growth on the valley floor, then start planning the infrastructure needed to occupy that space with out poisoning your water and that of those down stream. I will not even pause to explore the potential impacts of your land use decisions on the Native American populations down the watershed from you. Now is the time to start planning and implementing a transportation network to move the population when the fuel runs out or gets so expensive that only the mega-rich will be using private transportation. Get the sewer systems in now. Water quality regulations will never be less burdensome than they are now, and external public scrutiny on Montana will only increase as down-stream water demands increase.
You have the ideas and resources necessary to do this job. Because of where you live you have the attention of every conservation and resource management organization in the country. One of the benefits of living in the Rocky Mountain West is the integrated relationship of public and privately-owned lands and the resource values these lands provide for the residents. While serving as Planning Director, I was able to attend a seminar sponsored by several of the public land management agencies for their professional staff to address the issue of implementing public policy in the face of community opposition. The core concepts of this methodology, which I am sharing below, provided the underlying rationale for my support for the CPC approach to planning. The Institute for Participatory Management and Planning established by, Doctors Hans and Annemarie Bleiker came to the Flathead in the early 1990's to present a methodology that has been dramatically effective in mobilizing community support for difficult-to implement public policy decisions and natural resource management issues. I would strongly recommend the concepts to any citizens' group or elected officials that have the responsibility for implementing policy in conditions of opposition or mixed community support. The first concept is that in many cases, you can never reach uniform agreement, on all or even most issues. What is possible to achieve is a condition of informed consent among those affected by an action. Based upon that informed consent individuals can and will accept actions chosen even if it goes against their perceived short-term self interest. The conditions under which this can occur (the 'Bleiker Life Preserver') are: - All affected parties must accept that fact that the decisions to be made are important to their long term interest. There really is a serious problem . . . Or opportunity . . . One that just has to be addressed.
- You (or your organization) are the right entity to address it . . . In fact, given your mission, it would be irresponsible if you didn't.
- The way you are going about it . . . i.e. The way you are tackling the problem . . . Is reasonable, . . . sensible, . . . responsible.
- You are listening; you do care . . . If, what you are proposing is going to hurt someone, it's not because you're not listening; it's not because you don't care...
The purpose is that those making the decision are providing a legitimate opportunity for those affected to participate in the process and affect the outcome. Second is that of development of a broad-based community understanding that what is being proposed is indeed a reasonable, sensible and responsible approach to dealing with the future of land use planning and regulation. Here again, in the CPC process, the anti- regulatory stakeholders were not successfully brought on board. I believe that their opposition was based upon dramatically exaggerated fears of the intent and purpose of the planning process. Given the extreme nature of the rumors said to underlie the planning effort, I do not know if the bland truth would have carried the argument for support. A third area, one that I still debate internally, is the issue of legitimacy. Is/was the Cooperative Planning Coalition the proper vehicle for making the effort to draft and propose the plan? I would argue that at the time, given the fractious nature of the Valley, the combined efforts of the planning board, the real estate profession, citizen volunteers and technical staff was the alternative of choice. The problem was failing to convince planning opponents that the CPC effort was a viable and responsible alternative to unregulated development.
In looking at the planning failure of the mid-nineties there are lessons to be learned. First and foremost is that all stakeholders must agree that there is an important issue that needs to be addressed. As long as there is a segment of the population that does not agree that there is a need to act for the greater common good, you will probably never achieve informed consent. In the process of negotiation for settlement of conflict or grievance issues, if one or more of the parties of the process has no 'buy in' to the perceived long-term result , or has a predetermined commitment to having the process fail, legitimate settlement can not be achieved. In governance issues in particular, if that unconvinced constituency has political clout, even well-intentioned and funded efforts are doomed to fail. The CPC effort suffered this fate. While writing about this planning issue, our copy of the internationally recognized restaurateur George Lang's autobiography came. In it he wisely states that there is more to learn from failure than success, because the circumstances are more interesting and instructive. I appreciated his candor observing that looking critically at our failures helps us avoid repeating them and sets a part of the framework for future success. I hope that this is possible in western Montana, a place my now-grown children have chosen to live, and that I still have great affection toward.
Twenty years ago if there had been a conscious decision for the valley to be built out with minimal controls it would look a lot like it does now. Are the majority of the citizens happy with the result? Without planning the next twenty years will be more of the same or worse. To begin to address the future you do not need to look far from home. The last Flathead Study Commission report from the late 1980's has an excellent set of recommendations for the future. The initial draft of the CPC plan is another resource already heavily invested in. Citizen volunteers on the county and city planning boards and the incredible number of community based organizations and associations in the Flathead hold the potential to create and implement a vision for the future. Support those elected officials who are willing to take a leadership stance for a planned future. Get involved now and decide which future will become a reality. There are many external resources available as well: Drs. Bleiker and the Institute being one of them; The planning staff from the cities and the county, the US National Park and Forest Service are available as advisors; The Flathead Land Trust has been active in conservation for the last twenty years; The Montana Land Reliance, The Trust for Public Land, The Wilderness Society, Sierra Club, DU, TU and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, The Flathead Basin Commission, and the State of Montana are also excellent sources of information and support. The hard reality is that the past is gone. The future is up for grabs.
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