POLSON — The room was packed with planners, land use and natural resource officials, as well as concerned citizens during the two-day Lessons of the Lake conference at KwaTaqNuk resort in Polson.
The Flathead’s economy is tied to its beauty. People are coming, building, moving in because they want to be near that beauty. Last week’s ‘Lessons of the Lakes: Promoting Water Quality Amidst Community Growth’ conference addressed the problems that come with growth.
Issues of ecology, economy, and water quality protection were addressed at the two-day affair.
Larry Swanson, Director of the O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West, said new growth is “squeezing all the slack out of our seasonality.” What was once a seasonal economy is now a year-round economy, he said, with new growth not in natural resources, but in construction and service jobs.
The Rocky Mountains have the fastest growing regional economy in the U.S., Swanson said, but it is heavily dependent on realty-based businesses, which Swanson describes as “hollow and not sustainable."
While population growth in the Flathead is listed at a steady three percent per year, part-time residents are not counted in that growth, he said. The effect is there are more people impacting the area than are statistically accounted for. In 20 years, the full-time residential population of the valley is expected to exceed 140,000 individuals, Swanson added.
Most of those moving in are in two age groups: those above 60 and those from 20 – 30 years old. The population growth comes with a steadily rising inflation. The impact of growth, he said, is greater than what can be made up for through taxing homeowners.
“We’ve already tapped out property taxes — we’re over-dependant on property taxes,” he said.
“Per capita income in Lake County,” Swanson said, “is way too low. We need to increase wages.” Swanson suggests local government look into work force development and diversification, rather than relying on unregulated housing growth to fuel the economy.
To that end, Swanson said businesses that move in must be “on top of the pack. If you don’t stand out, you’re not in the picture.”
Swanson believes the key to sustainable growth is proper planning and regulation. One good example, he said, was Ravalli County, which voted in a $10 million open space bond to keep agricultural land in production. They are “putting in place tools and planning processes” to confront their increased growth, he said. Lake County was also praised as being proactive in addressing issues before inevitable changes damage quality of life.
“Lake County had some good ideas — higher densities close to towns,” he said. But “Flathead County has had a hard time getting there,” he said. To be effective, he said, planning needs to integrate businesses, government and the public.
“Urban-rural relations really matter,” Swanson said. “They must be knit into a partnership.”
Even the governor had an opinion on how to preserve the quality of life in the Flathead basin. Brian Schweitzer urged attendees to vote in leadership that would guide growth with thoughtful planning. And, he said, “listen to the voices of those who have lived here for 5,000 years.”
“Plan for the next seven generations. You can’t keep (people) from coming to the Flathead. All you can do is develop a strategy to address those that come.”
Knowing how other municipalities address the concerns brought by development to their lakeside communities acts as a tool for planning, said additional speakers at the conference.
Representatives from Rocky Mountain lake and riverine communities in Tahoe, Coeur d’Alene, Alberta, Montana and Oregon exchanged ideas and strategies to address the growth all accept as inevitable.
Some of the ideas sounded radical to Montanans’ ears. Lake Tahoe, for instance, pipes out all of its sewage effluent to an area outside the Lake basin. That wouldn’t work here, said one attendee, because of the terrain and the many miles of lakeshore around Flathead. Plus, the cost is prohibitive. Even John Singlaub, executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, says his area could not put such a system into place at today’s prices.
One idea that brought audience interest was a process used in the Big Hole Valley. There, a citizen-initiated planning process resulted in streamside setbacks of 150 feet.
The number, said Noorjahan Parwana, director of the Big Hole Watershed Committee, “was based on what people could agree to” and not any hard fast scientific claim. Still, some residents of that valley complain the development setback does not go far enough.
In Coeur d’Alene, however, a 50-foot setback has “people balking that it’s too stringent,” said Phil Cernera, director of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s Lake Management Department.
In all the scenarios represented, the one commonality the communities held was dealing with incoming growth.
Tim Davis, of the Montana Smart Growth Coalition, said growth numbers along the Highway 93 corridor are even higher than those of the rest of the state. There are, simply, more people per square mile of land along the corridor.
“We are using the land at a much greater per capita rate than we ever have before,” he said.
Still, he said there is hope. “The Lake County growth policy does a great job of explaining why zoning is in everyone’s benefit.” It is also doing so proactively, he said.
“Most counties do subdivision review without looking at how the developments or roads connect or their impacts on other properties,” he said. When that occurs, Davis said our landscape ends up “looking like Ohio with mountains.”
Some areas, such as Lake Tahoe, limit growth altogether.
There, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency — a group established jointly by California, Nevada, and the federal government, limits the size of new developments, the total area available for development and, importantly, the type of development.
“We became an agency of planners with teeth,” said Singlaub. Also, “no one jurisdiction has power over another,” he said.
Because the Tahoe area has a limited land base where growth is allowed, the agency now deals more with redevelopment than with infill. They are also, Singlaub said, “less concerned” with species protection than with water clarity, a dividing line no one in the Flathead Basin would ever cross.
More relevant to the Flathead, perhaps, are the experiences of the Coeur D’Alene Tribe and the Big Hole Watershed Committee.
In Idaho, the Coeur D’Alene tribe has claimed all water rights from the lake, but were only granted a third of the lake through court process.
“The tribes never even thought of owning the lake,” Cernera said, “until they realized people were grabbing this land.”
His area, he said, has seen “amazing trends in population growth.”
The tribe is now trying to manage the invasive weeds, agricultural pressures, recreation, nutrient loading and spills on the lake, he said.
“Don’t let a few people spoil your objectives,” Cernera urged Montanans. “Clean water is the gold standard.”
And Flathead Lake is clean. For now, anyway.
Ric Hauer, professor of limnology at the Flathead Lake Biological Station, said the Lake is healthy right now. He called it “one of the cleanest lakes in the world in the temperate regions.”
But, he said, it has seen steady increases in algal growth over the past 30 years, brought about by nutrient loading due to population pressures on the valley floodplain.
“These floodplains are the primary places where water is cleaned,” Hauer said, equating the subsurface gravels of the valley with an aquarium filtration system. People understand how an aquarium works, he said. They don’t always understand the valley.
He explained: The ecology of the Flathead basin is based on one substance: water.
While everyone knows about the lakes and rivers, many people don’t realize there is an entire system of subsurface water flowing through the valley. Surface water from streams and lakes percolate into gravelly beds, “paleo-channels” that act as ground water pathways, said Hauer.
“The alluvial aquifer goes from valley wall to valley wall,” he said, indicating there is no place in the valley that is not part of the ground water system.
“Ground water typically flows at rates of meters per day,” Hauer said, but in the Flathead Valley, “preferential pathways” created by the constant movement of the river across the valley floor sends water through surrounding gravels at rates of meters per second, returning water to the river or the lake in a single day.
This makes the ground waters of the Flathead basin especially susceptible to infiltration by pollution, he said.
In areas of nutrient loading, he said, algae and insect life both boom.
Still, Hauer said, one of the biggest threats to the lake’s health isn’t in Montana, but north, in British Columbia.
A proposed Canadian coal mine could irrevocably damage the waters of Flathead Lake and the entire Flathead Basin, Hauer said.
“At the mine site, there are bore holes,” he said, releasing water with a chemistry that would devastate the Flathead.
Hauer said the sample wells have rates of sulfates 18 times higher than the Lake, and nitrates 650 times as high. Nitrates, Hauer reminded, are a plant fertilizer that could lead to algae blooms and lowered oxygen levels in the Flathead’s waters.
Most worrisome, though, are the high rates of selenium. Selenium, Hauer said, causes kidney and liver failure. It causes neurological damage in children. And, he said, it concentrates in body tissue as you go up the food chain.
Selenium levels at the Canadian mine site are 57 times higher than those of Montana’s water.
Because of the gravelly composition and rapid subsurface flow rates in the Flathead Basin, Hauer said drinking wells could easily be contaminated if the mine is activated.
“The toxins form the mining will be in the domestic water supply, no question,” he said.
Because the project is out of the United States, Hauer said the only recourse Flathead dwellers have is to contact their elected officials and urge them to protest the project.
The governor agreed.
“We are at a great deal of risk from coal bed methane” production, Schweitzer said. But “we can’t dictate what British Columbia does, we can only suggest.”
Schweitzer fears, if the project north of the Flathead continues, “nearly 100 percent of the material will end up in the water supply, and it all goes downhill.”
Schweitzer said the state is discussing reinjection and desalination of the water with Canada. “We don’t want to allow the development to destroy the water quality,” Schweitzer added.
“We have to manage our resources to protect the environment to perpetuate three unique tribal cultures that exist nowhere else in the world,” said Janet Camel, director of Land Use Planning for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.
“Extractive industries and development are secondary” to land protection for future generations, Camel said.
Schweitzer also touched on the need for proactive community planning and zoning. “After you’ve built all these box stores and strip malls, it’s a little late to plan your rose gardens, your trails, your open space,” he said.
Singlaub agreed. In the past, he said, “there was a belief that all growth is good. Today we know better.”
The notion of pure profit motive has to be rethought, he said. “People don’t come to these areas to see a Target or a Wal-Mart. We are special areas. The only way we can keep being special is to do the right thing.”
“Protecting against rampant, unregulated development comes with a price,” Singlaub said. “Those who benefit from private development have to pay for it. The burden has to be placed on the developer. You have to do it with conviction.”
Singlaub said for every irresponsible developer who whines that environmental protective regulations are too prohibitive, “right behind them will come in a responsible developer willing to do it right.”
During a panel discussion, different growth management tools were presented to the community. Robert Horne Jr., an urban planning consultant, suggested the Flathead region utilize specific planning tools such as conditional use permits, laws allowing agriculture but requiring permits for other uses, character-based zoning and streamside setbacks. Relying only on subdivision review, he said, denies the predictability zoning can provide. Ordinances limiting development based on slope, water table or an updated growth policy provide you with legal protection against random development, he said.
The Big Hole’s Parwana offered additional ideas.
Their regulations include a right-to-farm provision and requiring new development be built around existing communities. They imposed a common standard across the entire watershed, she said, to negate differences in cross-jurisdictional boundaries.
Camel said the tribes considered water quality one of their directives when writing guides for Highway 93’s redesign. They want to keep growth near existing urban areas, and limit billboards to “less scenic areas.”
“The other land developers need to pay attention to our concerns,” said Steve Lozar in a tribal cultural film presented at the conference.
“We want to preserve this as a pristine area,” he said. “We are a people who live into the future.”
