COEUR d’ALENE — It’s back to the drawing board for Kootenai County’s controversial land use code if County Commissioners accept the recommendations of its Planning and Zoning Commission.

The planning commission on Monday voted to move forward on writing a new land use code without the help of Kendig Keast, the county’s land-use consultant which developed the controversial Unified Land Use Code.

The commission met to consider a prospectus provided by the consultant that details what the county needs to do in order to simplify the ULUC and make it more user friendly.

When Commission Chairman Wes Hanson laid out two options on how to proceed, Commissioner Linda Fillios provided a third option.

“I have a third option. Get rid of it totally,” she said, adding she talked with several people of all different political persuasions and they all told her to “chuck it.”

“You know what this reminds me of?” she asked Hanson. “You and I both cook, and you know what it is like when you put a cup of salt in a cake, instead of sugar. You’ve got to throw it out.

“That’s what I feel about (the ULUC) at this point.”

Hanson suggested moving ahead with reviewing the document to determine what problems everybody has with it before deciding on whether to continue with Kendig Keast and the ULUC.

Commissioner Collin Coles suggested a motion to get the process moving again. He proposed moving forward without Kendig Keast, utilizing what the commission has received from the public and the consultant but only after addressing major issues that have been identified in the document.

He listed four issues: shoreline protection regulations, non-residential property regulations, area of city impact agreements and a proper zoning and mapping exercise.

After some discussion, Coles modified his motion to develop a land use code without Kendig Keast, and use the ULUC as a draft to begin that process.

Commissioner John Malloy did not like that idea and suggested voting on three separate motions, one to determine if the county should continue with the consultant, another to determine how to proceed with the ULUC document and another to determine a path forward.

Commissioner Martha Cook was leery of that and said she didn’t want to be banned from using some of the information within ULUC document.

Ultimately, the commission decided to vote on each issue separately.

Commissioners passed a recommendation to move forward without Kendig Keast, with four commissioners voting yes and Cook abstaining.

Malloy made a motion recommending the planning commission discontinue any further consideration of the ULUC.

“Let’s throw the cake out,” he said. “I don’t want to try to take the salt out of it.”

 Cook didn’t like the motion and asked Malloy to retract it. He refused.

“I absolutely object to be forbidden from using this document,” Cook said.

The commission discussed how the information could still be used to write a new land use code, but most did not want to use the ULUC as a basis for the re-write.

Malloy clarified that the intent was to discontinue use of the current ULUC document and start over.

Commissioners Coles and Cook voted no on the motion, but the three other commissioners voted in favor of it.

The discussion then shifted to how the commissioners were going to move the new land use process forward. They accepted Coles’ list of four issues and added, at Cook’s request, the need to address special use standards and residential development standards.

The commission finally agreed to begin the process at an already scheduled meeting from 5-7 p.m. Thursday.

The commission will start developing policy recommendations for shoreline protection regulations. They plan to tackle the other issues before moving them into a public process.

The county commissioners will have to act on the commission’s recommendations later this week before proceeding with a re-write of the land use code.