City mulling comp plan changes
SANDPOINT — In the wake of three zone change requests on land surrounding the Sandpoint Airport, city staff are proposing a plan to amend Sandpoint’s comprehensive plan to add a state-required chapter on the airport and its land use.
“This is an issue that we should not put off,” said city planning and economic development director Aaron Qualls during the June 19 City Council meeting. “We have initiated a comp plan update and we’d like to really delve into the airport sooner rather than later.”
The safe and efficient operation of the airport and the people living or working nearby essentially comes down to two things — noise and safety, Qualls said. For noise, the goal is to avoid issues that cause annoyance and sleep disturbances to people on the ground. There are two categories regarding safety in protecting planes and people. The first category, hazards to airspace and overflights, includes limiting structure height, visual obstructions such as lights, and wildlife and bird attractants such as wetlands. The second category, uses that affect accident severity, include high concentrations of people and risk-sensitive uses such as nursing homes or hospitals.
Idaho’s Airport Land Use Guidelines provide six recommended airport land use compatibility zones, Qualls said. Those include runway protection zones, lateral safety zones, critical zones, airport traffic pattern area, airport influence area and impact coordination zone. Council members became familiar with some of these, such as the lateral safety zone, during the recent zone change requests put before them.
“They are intended as a starting place,” Qualls said of the recommendations. “The need and composition of them is determined by the local jurisdiction, planning goals of the local jurisdiction, as well as the issues that face every airport around land use compatibility.”
Council members also heard from Dave Schuck, manager of the Sandpoint and Priest River airports.
“Airports are for everyone,” he said. “They give us access to the sky, much like our boat ramps give access to the lake. Our goal here … is to not protect the airport from the community, but to protect the community from the airport.”
Protecting the community from the noises and the hazards of the airport is the biggest priority, he said. Schuck said 83 percent of airplane accidents happen near the airport. In his time at the airport there have been two — one in 2008 and one in 2012, he said. While they were contained, he said, both could have “easily” gone outside the airport property.
Noise, he said, is the biggest complaint, especially in the spring. Specific to the land use amendments, Schuck said airports across the country are dealing with the same issues, so Sandpoint is not “reinventing the wheel.”
“We have decades of experience from the FAA and ITD to give us some guidance,” he said. “We also have the local comp plan and overlay ordinance … My recommendation is when we work on the comp plan and any ordinances that we include some other criteria in the overlay, or if we adopt lateral safety zones, that sort of thing, because it is overly permissive and doesn’t address any of the other issues such as safety and sound.”
An interim update to the comprehensive plan is slated for December of this year, intended to specifically address possible airport compatibility zones and other factors around the airport. Completion of the overall update is slated for fall 2020.
Qualls suggested council members consider a temporary moratorium on new zone change applications in the airport overlay until the plan amendment is completed, which they will discuss at a future meeting.
Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.