The Evergreen business community now has a permanent zoning tool designed to boost commercial development.

The Flathead County commissioners on Monday unanimously approved the Evergreen enterprise overlay zone for the commercial neighborhoods outside of Kalispell city limits. An interim enterprise zone had been in place for two years at the request of the Evergreen Chamber of Commerce.

The overlay zoning allows a variety of light industrial uses in addition to the commercial business zones along the U.S. 2 and Montana 35 corridors. The idea is to allow uses other than retail business in a variety of empty buildings in Evergreen.  

Creating the special zoning required some extra work for the county Planning Office because the applicable master plan for that area is almost 30 years old.

A permanent zoning district that replaces an interim zoning district has to be based on a master plan, and for Evergreen that plan is the 1986 Kalispell City-County Master Plan, written before public sewer service was extended to Evergreen and various surges of commercial growth occurred along the highway corridors.

Evergreen got sewer service when the city of Kalispell and the Evergreen Water and Sewer District signed an agreement in 1990 to extend wastewater treatment service to Evergreen.

After that, retail business boomed in Evergreen in the mid-1990s and again in the early 2000s.

The land-use map in the outdated plan shows swaths of residential land that have long been developed as commercial properties. It also states redevelopment shouldn’t be done in the flood plain, but since then flood-plain maps have been redrawn, which meant areas that had been commercially developed became part of the flood plain.

Although an effort to update the 1986 plan was made in 1997, a draft growth policy was never adopted. Kalispell used parts of the draft policy when it adopted its own master plan in 2003, but since the county didn’t adopt Kalispell’s plan, it left the outdated 1986 plan in place for Evergreen.

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