From the Thursday, February 14, 2008 online edition of the Hungry Horse News . . .

Line by line. Page by page. In a nearly three-hour long meeting, the Flathead County Planning Board had a give and take session with North Forkers on their neighborhood plan last Wednesday.

The conversation was a civil affair and in the end, it looks like the plan will see some tweaking, but not a major overhaul.

Part of the conversation centered on whether the plan is regulatory or advisory. Neighborhood plans, by design, are supposed to be a framework for zoning. The intent was to make them advisory and then having zoning that followed their direction.

But a recent Montana Supreme Court decision interpreted Flathead County’s neighborhood plans as regulatory — saying, in short, that if a neighborhood plan was more stringent than the zoning, then the county had to follow the neighborhood plan.

That throws the North Fork Neighborhood Plan for a loop in some instances, because the neighborhood plan has some subjective language — particularly when it comes to commercial development.

Read the entire article . . .