Developers want to build 1,000 housing units in three years

The Daily Inter Lake

A public meeting will be held in Hungry Horse on Wednesday to discuss the 1,000-unit South Fork Addition subdivision proposal.

The meeting is at Canyon Elementary School from 5-8 p.m.

This is the second time developer Stephan Byrd and Hungry Horse Development Partners have presented the project to the community. The first meeting was in August, just before they submitted the subdivision application to the Flathead County Planning Office.

South Fork Addition would be built on 90 acres of former U.S. Forest Service land on the southeast side of town. The Hungry Horse Ranger Station currently is on the northernmost portion of the site. The remainder of the property extends south along Colorado Boulevard to the South Fork of the Flathead River.

Byrd, who has family in the area, acquired the property at auction last year with a bid of $2.38 million.

If approved, the subdivision would almost quadruple the number of housing units in Hungry Horse.

The application initially suggested that South Fork Addition would be built in four phases over about 10 years. However, a revised phasing plan indicates that the project would be completed by 2010.

Almost two-thirds of the residences would be apartment or condominium units; there also would be 47 duplex townhouses, 53 triplexes and 16 single-family homes.

Another 60 commercial lots are planned on about 5 acres next to the highway. They would be built sometime after the ranger station relocates to a new facility.

The first phase of the project, according to the initial application, would involve 34 apartment buildings with a total of 400 residential units on 20 acres just south of the ranger station.

Phase II would feature the 16 single-family lots, as well as 41 duplexes and 39 triplexes, for a total of 215 units.

Phase III would be south of Canyon Elementary School along the river. It would include 285 units divided between six duplexes, 14 triplexes and 39 apartment buildings.

The final phase would include all of the commercial lots, plus another 100 apartment/condominium units.

The project would have 32 acres of open space, including two parks and a network of bike/pedestrian paths. It would be connected to Hungry Horse's public water system; the developer also proposed building a public wastewater treatment facility that would be able to serve the entire community.

The wastewater system would have to be approved by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. It could eventually be turned over to the Hungry Horse sewer district to own and operate.

A traffic impact analysis provided with the application indicated that, at full build-out, South Fork Addition would be expected to produce 459 new vehicle trips per day in the morning and 736 in the evening. It concluded that the development "will have minimal impacts on the transportation system, and that no traffic mitigation is recommended or required."

The county planning office typically estimates that one single-family home lot generates 10 vehicle trips per day.