Code hearings resume Monday

SANDPOINT - The latest incarnation of reforms to Bonner County's land use code goes through the wringer again next week.

The county commission is conducting a public hearing on Monday in Sandpoint and another hearing on Thursday in Priest River. Both hearings start at 6 p.m. at Sandpoint Community Hall and Priest River Junior High School, respectively.

The latest version of the reforms are the product of nine months of review from an ad hoc committee. Proposed changes to the county's zoning map will also be considered during next week's hearings.

The county is retaining its 40-foot development setback for waterfront properties on Lake Pend Oreille and the Pend Oreille and Clark Fork rivers. A 75-foot setback is proposed for other streams and rivers.

For parcels which can't meet the 75-foot setback, a grandfather clause is proposed which would scale down the setback to no less than 40 feet, said county Planning Director Clare Marley.

However, landowners adjacent to about a dozen streams or rivers would not qualify for the grandfather clause because the Natural Resource Conservation Service has identified those water bodies as flood prone, Marley said.

Wetlands would have a 40-foot setback, although Marley said there's language in the proposed code which would reduce that setback to up to 20 feet if it can be demonstrated that the wetlands are already deteriorated, have been significantly changed or are of a low functional quality.

The new code would disallow the factoring of submerged lands into density calculations. However, 50 percent of submerged lands on dam-controlled bodies of water can be counted toward open space in planned unit developments and 100 percent in all other development scenarios.

"The biggest discussion we had was on the vegetative buffer along shorelines. We probably spent more meetings and more minutes talking about that than anything else," Marley said.

Despite the lengthy discussion, Marley said the ad hoc committee was closely divided on what to recommend in the proposed 40-foot waterfront vegetative buffer. Some on the committee lobbied for allowing only native plants, while others sought allowances for beneficial, non-native plants. The committee was also split on whether a landowner should be allowed to remove existing vegetation and replace it with a lawn or landscaping or whether existing vegetation should remain intact.

Marley said county commissioners decided to leave each of the vegetative buffer options on the table.

"They want to hear further discussion from the public on it," she said.