A complaint was filed Friday in District Court attempting to revert action taken in recent months by the Flathead County commissioners to create a new zone classification.

Citizens for a Better Flathead and Ponderosa Estates resident Sharon DeMeester filed a verified complaint and application for a writ of mandate, writ of review and declaratory relief in connection with the new greenbelt zone adopted by the commissioners last July.

District Judge Stewart Stadler set a show-cause hearing for 8:30 a.m. Feb. 2 in the matter. Should the county fail to participate in that hearing, Stadler’s directive for the county to revoke its adoption of a resolution to create the new district would become effective.

Stadler set the hearing date in an alternative writ of mandate, which he signed Friday. An alternative writ of mandate orders a governmental agency to obey the order or show cause at a hearing why it should not.

The alternative writ of mandate is a standard part of the civil litigation process, county Planning Director BJ Grieve said. It sets a show-cause hearing for the parties to explain their positions.

The citizens group and DeMeester want the new zoning classification revoked because they maintain it’s inconsistent with the county growth policy.

Mayre Flowers, executive director of Citizens for a Better Flathead, said greenbelt zoning is inconsistent with the county growth policy, which calls for limiting strip commercial development between towns and emphasizes the need to direct growth toward existing town centers.

“At issue in this suit against Flathead County is the failure of this new B-2HG (greenbelt) zoning policy to comply with the public’s vision of how best to encourage economic development and where commercial growth should occur,” Flowers said in a prepared statement.

She said concerns were raised by nearly 900 members of the public about the potentially negative impacts of strip commercial zoning and its impacts on the Flathead economy.

The county received 881 protests to the resolution to create the zone, but not all were from qualified property owners. State law calls for protests from 40 percent of qualified property owners to trigger the rule by which county commissioners can’t create a new zone. In this case, about 2,800 people would have had to protest before the commissioners would have been prevented from creating the new zone.

In December, county commissioners voted to zone 16 parcels covering 64 acres along U.S. 93 as a greenbelt. The protest period for that zone change is in place until after Jan. 14. The change isn’t effective unless commissioners approve a final resolution.

The greenbelt concept came before the Planning Board in 2010 when Marilyn Noonan asked about a new zone for property she owns on U.S. 93 North near Kalispell.

In an earlier interview with the Daily Inter Lake, Noonan said she and some of her neighbors wanted to create a zone with bigger setbacks in Flathead County. They also wanted “some landscaping to keep the visual highway corridors a little nicer-looking than current zoning offers,” she said.

At a December public hearing on the requested zone change, Noonan said there was “already significant commercial development along this corridor.”

DeMeester, who spearheaded the legal challenge that led to the redesign of the proposed Glacier Town Center that never was built, said opening the door to strip development “is a recipe for turning the Flathead into an unappealing, ‘Anywhere USA’ hodgepodge of strip development.”

At the December hearing, DeMeester said the new zone classification would allow for “almost unlimited commercial development along roads in Flathead County.”