LAKESIDE - A decade and a half back, when Joe and Kim Orr bought their home on the northwest shore of Flathead Lake, every flush filled the nearby septic tank - “and it only took a few years for the septic to fail.”
Then Lakeside built a modern sewage plant, Joe said, and the Orrs rushed to hook up.
Actually, the worst thing was getting the system before getting any land-use zoning.
“That's the real problem down there,” agreed Jeff Harris, director of Flathead County's planning office. “They have a sewage system that allows high-density growth, but no controls on how growth happens. It's a very attractive area for developers.”
In fact, from the Orrs' lakeside porch, you can watch construction of Somers Bay Villas, 23 luxury condominiums on 2.2 acres just south of Kalispell.
“Lakeside has public sewer,” Harris said. “That's the only way they can get these densities.”
And make no mistake: Density is what this is all about.
Kim Orr's been knocking on doors, surveying her neighbors up and down Flathead Lake, measuring their properties and sizing up their homes.
Turns out, people here like big lawns better than big houses. Only 25 percent of the property, on average, is developed, leaving the rest as timbered green space.
That's just about the opposite of the condominium project going up next door.
So Orr asked her neighbors - 95 homeowners on 115 lots tucked into the gentle arc of Somers Bay - whether they'd be willing to sign a petition for zoning that would, among other things, limit high-density projects. A full 80 percent said yes.
“Our neighborhood is electrified right now,” Joe said. “We know what these high-density developments can do to us.”
What they can do to traffic, to water quality in Flathead Lake, to the nature of the neighborhood.
“This kind of density is completely out of place and out of character,” he said. “It doesn't belong here.”
Which is exactly what many here have long said about zoning and land-use planning.
But Orr believes “the political pendulum is swinging back.” People, he said, “finally realize what's at stake. The way it is now, there's no grounds for telling a developer ‘no,' and so they do whatever they want.”
It's a slippery business, this matter of determining how much is too much. Ask the Orrs, and they'll say Somers Bay Villas is too much. Ask the old-timers, and maybe the Orrs' place, modest as it is, is too much. Ask the Indian tribes who long lived on these lands, and maybe the old-timers were too much.
“Where's the limit?” Orr asked. “That's what everyone wants to know.”
On April 21, 2004, the day Somers Bay Villas went before the Flathead County planning board, only three people showed up to comment. Two were neighbors. One was the real estate agent brokering the deal.
Times have changed.
“At this point,” Harris said, “there's huge interest out there on the part of the neighbors. That area is a tremendously busy building zone, but there's really nothing to guide it. People see the change, and the result we see is a real interest in planning coming from the neighborhoods.”
Most want to craft a neighborhood plan that would allow them to apply land-use zoning locally, and most want to use that tool to limit density. Motor along just offshore and the reason is clear: Throughout the bay are what could be called cottages, small homes nestled under a canopy of shade trees with big patches of green in-between.
But Flathead County is in the final throes of a new growth policy, Orr said, and won't entertain any new neighborhood plan requests until that long-range document is completed.
Meanwhile, the county does entertain new development requests, leaving Orr to wonder “why what's good for the goose isn't good for the gander.”
Surprisingly, even the developer at Somers Bay Villas admits density might be a legitimate concern. But, said Doug Gamble, developers don't control density - local government does. If people want change, they should be hounding the county commissioners, not developers.
“We've had a (county) permit for every piece of this job,” Gamble said. “We didn't do anything without county approval.”
Gamble says he and his partner are “certainly sympathetic to the neighbors in the Lakeside and Somers communities,” but adds that “all this development is focusing here because there was a sewer system and no zoning in place. That was a community choice.”
Zoning, he said, “has been a dirty word. But now they're realizing that some planning certainly can be a good thing.”
That's easy for Gamble to say. His project is already approved and under way.
But that's not the case a couple hundred yards up the lake, where developers of the Landmark condominium project recently learned just how apt their name really was.
While just two neighbors turned out to comment on Somers Bay Villas, a couple dozen came armed with tough questions at Landmark's public hearing.
“It signaled a big change,” Harris said. “With this high-density growth, there's a concern that the community character and vision are changing. But the people who live there aren't able to drive that change.”
In the end, it all comes back to the county.
The neighbors are upset with a county planning and approval process that Kim Orr says “failed every step” in the case of Somers Bay Villas. There's been no oversight, she said, no enforcement except that which the neighbors themselves provided.
And the developers can only look to the county to keep them out of trouble when dense becomes too dense, as happened when Somers Bay Villas found itself in Flathead Lake's floodplain.
Even Harris, who is the county, wishes his bosses had given him more tools to work with, tools such as an actual building department and maybe a building inspector, preferably with some engineering expertise.
But for now, in Lakeside and Somers and throughout much of Flathead County, pretty much anything goes.
“It's got this way because for years no questions were asked,” Joe Orr said. “If you couldn't say ‘no,' then it was wide open. The county never tried to get out in front of it.”
Today, Orr says he's “spending a lot of my time trying to figure out which agency is responsible for what.” That's because he believes he cannot miss any chance to submit formal comments on his neighborhood's future.
It's not that he wants to shut the door behind him now that he's in, Orr said, not that he has some innate aversion to condominiums.
“I just want it to fit,” he said.
“You can't blame the people who are selling or developing the land,” Kim Orr added. “But there should be some consideration about those of us who still live here, some respect for the fact that this is our neighborhood.”
“The land should force the density,” Joe Orr said, “not the other way around.”
As that notion takes hold, he said, activism around Lakeside and Somers is ramping up. “There's more of it, and it's better informed. We should have done this years ago.”
Before long, he predicted, developments such as the one going up next door will no longer be allowed. The zoning, he said, will soon catch up with the sewage system.
“We're seeing the requests for planning,” Harris said. “The area's largely un-zoned, and that worries people.”
It is a response, he said, to a trend, and not to any particular project. In addition to the 60 or so condos at Landmark, he said, his office is reviewing nearly a half-dozen proposals for high-density lakeshore development every year.
Most of those haven't gone public, he said, “but the word's out, and people are mobilizing.”
Primarily, they are worried about water quality, he said, adding that “it'd be tough to say you could build that kind of density and not impact water quality.”
The county's lakeshore regulations are 25 years old, and although they've been amended now and again, they aren't keeping pace, Harris said. Before year's end, he'd like to completely overhaul the regs, and perhaps the floodplain rules as well.
Setbacks from the water, now 20 feet, could be extended to 100 feet in some areas.
“We are working on projects one by one,” Harris said. “There's no common vision, no connectivity. That's where we need to have a community discussion.”
Joe Orr, for one, will be there when those talks start. So, quite likely, will Gamble.
Because everyone wants the big water view, the perfect piece of paradise, and they're willing to pay. A couple dozen million-dollar condos are certain to bring in far more cash than most any single-family home, and the drive to maximize is on.
“This is a huge quantum leap,” Orr said as he steered his boat along the shore, “from what you see here to the kind of development the condos are bringing in.
“Where's the line, that's what I'd like to know. Is there a line?”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com
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