A push by Evergreen business leaders to create special zoning to boost commercial development is complicated because the applicable master plan for that area is nearly 30 years old.

The Flathead County commissioners approved an interim enterprise overlay zone for Evergreen in late 2013 at the request of the Evergreen Chamber of Commerce. A year later the interim zoning was extended for an additional year.

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.

Now the Evergreen Chamber has asked the county to proceed with making the overlay zone permanent.

“The thing about this project is that the end result is very simple — make the Evergreen Enterprise Zoning Overlay permanent when the interim version expires,” Flathead County Senior Planner BJ Grieve said. “There are no changes, but getting there is remarkably complicated.”

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.

The 1986 plan predicted that Evergreen “potentially could have an operating sewer system within the next five to 10 years.”

Sewer service did indeed come to Evergreen 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The land-use map in the outdated plan shows swaths of residential land that have long been developed as commercial properties.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, Grieve said.

In 1997 an effort began to update the 1986 plan. Although a draft growth policy was written, it was never approved.

When the county disbanded the Flathead Regional Development Office, a joint planning office that oversaw planning for the county and its incorporated cities, the city of Kalispell used pieces of the 1997 draft and wrote and adopted its own master plan in 2003.

Because the county never adopted Kalispell’s 2003 plan, it left the 1986 plan in place for Evergreen.

The Kalispell City-County Planning Board, which oversaw planning for up to 4.5 miles outside of city limits — including Evergreen — also was disbanded as the county and cities divorced and began conducting planning separately.

About six years ago, some Evergreen community leaders broached the idea of development a neighborhood plan for Evergreen, but that effort was shelved because there as no “political will” to do further land-use planning in Evergreen, Grieve said.

Flathead County wrote a growth policy in 2007 and updated it five years later, but that plan does not include street-by-street land-use planning or a land-use map.

The current county growth policy includes various addendums such as neighborhood plans for other parts of the county, and it also includes the 1986 Kalispell City-County Master Plan as an addendum.

“The specific land-use guidance for the Evergreen highway commercial corridor currently is provided by the 1986 plan, so the diversification of allowable land uses in that area should be done as an addendum to that plan,” Grieve explained.

Creating a permanent overlay zone in Evergreen will require a publicly initiated three-step process.

First, a three-part amendment must be added to the 1986 Kalispell City-County Master Plan, describing the affected general business and community business zones affected by the overlay zone and an accompanying land-use map.

Next, county zoning regulations must be amended to include the new overlay use district and define permitted uses in the new zone.

The third and final step takes the zoning map and applies the permitted uses in the zoning text to that map in a specific area.

“The overlay is highly desired by the [Evergreen] community,” Grieve said. “It allows more diverse land uses.”

The idea is to allow uses other than retail business in a variety of empty buildings in Evergreen.  

The county is negotiating the purchase of the Walmart building in Evergreen for potential future use as a county jail. Grieve said public facilities are permitted in the general business zone in that area.

Notices will be mailed Sept. 23 to property owners inside the Evergreen Enterprise Overlay Zone and those within 150 feet of the new zoning overlay district.

The Flathead County Planning Board will hold a public hearing on the proposed permanent overlay zone on Oct. 14.

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