The Kootenai County, Idaho, Board of County Commissioners and the Kootenai County Planning Department decided that the existing Kootenai County land use code is confusing and outdated.    They determined the best approach to clarifying and updating the code would be to spend a pile o’ taxpayer dollars to hire a consultant do it.  Enter Kendig Keast Collaborative (KKC) to oversee the project.

According to the project’s website, the end product will be known as the Unified Land Use Code (ULUC).  ULUC’s objectives will be to:
– Make the code easier to use, which will make it easier to understand requirements and obtain approvals for the development and use of property;
– Revise or eliminate existing code provisions that are frustrating landowners because they are unnecessarily restrictive (i.e., they go further than they need to in order to achieve their stated objectives), or too difficult to understand; and
– Help implement Kootenai County’s Comprehensive Plan, which represents the hard work of the County’s residents in figuring out and articulating where their diverse values meet.

Here is a link to the proposed Kootenai County Unified Land Use Code (ULUC).  If you haven’t read it but want to, have a bottle of aspirin handy.That suggestion is based on my reading of it and the public responses at meetings where the ULUC was to be discussed.  The community responses were characterized in the Coeur d’Alene Press skewspaper’s articles headlined Angry crowd shuts down meeting (Published June 18, 2013) and Land use code red (Published June 19, 2013).  In the latter “…code red” article, Commissioners Nelson and Tondee attributed the negative public response to the public’s lack of education about the issue.  (Nelson:  “I am sure we can make headway there, but we’ll never make it simple enough for everyone.   I think the real problem is public education.”)  (Tondee:  “From this process it’s obvious we aren’t going to have a Kumbaya moment.  I don’t think we will be able to educate all of them. Some of them don’t want to be educated.”)

After spending the last few days actually studying the proposed ULUC (I really have to get a life…) and after consuming unreasonably large quantities of over-the-counter headache remedies, I’ve formed some uneducated opinions about ULUC:

1.  The ULUC is almost as easily understood as the Internal Revenue Code.

2.  The ULUC appears to be an attempt to codify the Comprehensive Plan.  My first impression is that the ULUC is the equivalent of dropping a 2000 pound bunker-buster bomb on a front yard in order to get a few moles under control.  The moles will be controlled, but the neighborhood will exemplify the term “collateral damage.”

3.  The ULUC seems to be more of an effort to strictly regulate land use rather than enable the maximum flexibility in land use.  To me, that’s trying to make it easier for the Planning Department to say, “No, that’s forbidden,” rather than “How can we help the applicant make this work while still providing reasonable protection for the rights of surrounding property owners.”  It also appears to me that the ULUC as written puts a whole lot of interpretive authority in the hands of County hirelings/regulators who may or may not have the knowledge, skills, abilities, and wisdom to fashion fairness rather that creating chaos.

4.  The ULUC seems to be an effort to apply micrometer precision to a yardstick world.   I’m not sure that the level of precision sought (ULUC) is easily and fairly compatible with Idaho statutes (yardstick).

5.  I fear that the complexity of the proposed ULUC could lead to predatory exploitation by people who will understand it better than the County employees and officials charged with making it work fairly and lawfully. We’ve seen that result here in CdA with some involved with the City’s urban renewal agency.   The ULUC has “unintended consequences” written all over it.

6.  After looking at the KKC website and at some of its Featured Projects,  I might have had more confidence and felt more comfortable with ULUC if KKC had already produced a similar land use code for another county with demographics comparable to Kootenai County’s.  To put it another way, I’m always a little uncomfortable buying a product that appears to have serial number 1.

The officials in Kootenai County do need to translate the Comprehensive Plan into an understandable, fair, and workable code.  I believe the citizens are willing to listen and comment, but only as long as they are confident their patience and comments will be respected and considered.

We, the citizens of Kootenai County, do need to trust our elected and appointed officials.  They are in their respective positions because we are willing to trust them, but only as long as we are confident they are competent, diligent, and honest.  For uneducated ol’ me, a demonstration of their worthiness of our trust would be for the Board of County Commissioners to personally stand alone in front of the pubic meetings (no staff or consultants present), explain the ULUC accurately and completely in terms we citizens can understand, and then answer the our  questions accurately and completely in equally understandable terms.  When Commissioners Green, Tondee, and Nelson are able to do that without having to refer anything to the staff planners, attorneys, shamans, snake oil salesmen, or witchdoctors, then I’d say ULUC may have a shot.