COEUR d'ALENE - Kootenai County is faced with a dilemma concerning the controversial land use code they have spent three years trying to revise - trash it and start over, or try and salvage what they have.

The County Planning Commission met with county commissioners in a workshop on Tuesday afternoon to try and resolve that, but to no avail.

"I have 53 pages here and we've only gotten through four pages," said Planning Commissioner Linda Fillios. "I guess I didn't expect it would be something like this. I thought we would look at the prospectus and say yes or no. Do we want to continue with this or not?"

Fillios was frustrated, as were other planning commissioners, by what appears to be a lengthy process ahead to decide whether the county wants to retain its land use consultant Kendig Keast Collaborative to fix its controversial Unified Land Use Code.

Commissioners determined that the ULUC needs to be re-written to incorporate more public comments and make it more user-friendly after the public turned out in droves to complain about the document at its first public hearing in June.

More than 300 people turned out to that June hearing to oppose the plan and the fire department shut the meeting down because the meeting room was over capacity.

After that, the county commissioners decided to send the land use code back to the consultant and asked what it would take to incorporate more public input and streamline the document.

Kendig Keast sent the county a 53-page prospectus that details what changes would have to be made to the code in order to incorporate the county's wishes.

County commissioners are now trying to decide if they want to move forward with the Kendig Keast plan, or scrap it and start over. They met in a workshop Tuesday with the Planning Commission to review the prospectus and ultimately decide how to proceed.

That didn't happen. The planning commission began the process of reviewing the document line-by-line and after two hours had only completed four pages of review.

That frustrated many in the room.

"I'd like to ask the commissioners are you committed to Kendig Keast because we have $400,000 into them?" asked Planning Commissioner John Malloy. "Or is it an option to write that $400,000 off as a bad experience, or a starting point, or something to get us to a code that is acceptable?

"To me, to go with Kendig Keast and reward bad behavior, you are just going to get more bad behavior."

County Commissioner Todd Tondee said the board is not married to Kendig Keast.

"I don't think any of us are," Tondee said. "But they are the most familiar with the document and in order to change it, it is going to be costly."

Bringing another consultant up to speed to go through the whole process again could be very expensive, he said.

The county is looking at cost options, Tondee said, and the consultant is still on the hook to deliver certain contract items that have yet to be completed.

"So we are looking at all of those options, but the short answer is no," Tondee said. "We want to have the best code possible for Kootenai County."

Bill Matson, a custom home builder who has been a vocal opponent of the ULUC, was clearly frustrated as well.

"The definition of insanity, from Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result," he said, as he got up to leave the meeting. "This is insanity."

Bob Bingham, with the Northwest Property Owners Association, said the planning commissioners are simply doing the same thing they did with the technical review committee early on in the process.

"I am trying to see where this leads that gets us to something," he said. "This particular draft I know rural property owners as a whole are going to fight into the grave if this keeps coming back the way it looks now."

At the beginning of the meeting four of the six planning commissioners appeared to have a problem with moving forward with the consultant.

Wes Hansen, chairman of the planning commission, said it is the commission's job to go through the document to determine if what is proposed in the prospectus will result in a workable code.

"Until you work through the particulars to decide, first of all, is this headed in the right direction," he said. "And second, according to the steps that are outlined or suggested, what will that produce as substantive changes, I don't know."

After that review, Hansen said the planning commission will make its recommendation to the county commissioners, who will ultimately make a decision on how to proceed.

After nearly three hours of discussion the commission decided to adjourn the meeting and reconvene at a later date to finish its review.