By LYNNETTEHINTZEThe Daily Inter Lake

Ten Arrows Ranch owners Bill and Alana Myers have withdrawn their application for a permit to operate a commercial wedding facility on their Bigfork-area property.

The Bigfork Land Use Advisory Committee was scheduled to hold a public hearing Thursday on the conditional-use permit request. That hearing has been canceled.

The Myerses were seeking a permit to operate a high-impact recreation and caretaker’s facility and had proposed ways to lessen the noise and neighborhood intrusion.

They had been staging weddings at their property off McCaffery Road the past two summers, but when neighbors began complaining about the noise and disruption, the Flathead County Planning Office investigated and shut down the facility because the property isn’t zoned to hold weddings.

The reasons for withdrawing the application are threefold, one of which was a technical error by the Planning Office, according to Planning Director BJ Grieve,

Last week Alana Myers submitted additional information changing some of the language of their revised application, but the Planning Office wasn’t able to revise the application since the previously submitted materials remained part of the record, Grieve said.

 “Also that same day, during the process of finishing the draft staff report, our office identified an error we had made regarding caretakers’ facilities,” Grieve continued. “We had told the Myerses they could call their current dwelling a caretaker’s facility in their application for a high-impact recreation facility. However, our error was that according to the conditional-use standards in the zoning regulations, a caretaker’s facility has to be on twice the amount of land that is otherwise the minimum of the zoning, so this one would have had to be on 10 acres, and it was on 5.”

While the Myerses identified a way of getting around the minimum lot size by aggregating two lots to create 10 acres, they were “understandably concerned with our error,” Grieve said.

The controversy over their proposal — largely from neighbors — along with costly improvements to make their property meet state regulations regarding building and environmental-health issues for commercial event venues prompted them to withdraw the application, he said.

“This action does not prevent them from applying again at some point in the future,” Grieve added.

The Flathead County Planning Board has had the issue of commercial wedding facilities in rural areas on its zoning update list for some time. The board has been working for several months on a comprehensive update of county zoning regulations, but has put that effort on hold until February.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.