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30 June 2009

Attacks on planning office are part of a larger scheme

Updated 2 July 2009. The attacks on Flathead County's planning office verge on a witch hunt. Not only do the Flathead’s libertarian capitalists, the laissez-faire and don’t-tread-on-me boys, want chief planner Jeff Harris’ head on a pike, they want the planning office rendered powerless and irrelevant. If they prevail, the planning department will be a one-person operation staffed by a blind clerk with a rubber stamp.

If that wasn’t crystal clear before, it became crystal clear last night. At an American Dream Montana meeting at the Red Lion Inn, reports the InterLake, critics of the planning office circulated a petition calling for:

…the immediate suspension of Harris without pay until the investigation is complete and the sequestering of all computers, public and private, that have been used to conduct public business relating to the Lakeside planning effort. It asks for an immediate moratorium on destruction of planning documents until final resolution of the investigation.

Without question, Flathead County’s planning office could have handled the Lakeside planning process better than it did. As I noted in my 28 June 2009 posting, the use of a clandestine Yahoo Group for official county business may have been a technical violation of Montana’s open meetings and open records laws, and really wasn’t a good idea from any standpoint. But the county took corrective action, and the process issues are being resolved.

What’s really at issue here is not process, but the very idea of planning. And I strongly suspect that what most concerns the critics is the possibility that the county might approve a neighborhood plan that reduces the value of big developments the critics may be considering. When hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars are at stake, people are willing to spend thousands on newspaper ads and lawsuits.

This strikes me as part of a larger movement by the far right to seize political control of Flathead County. Tammi Fisher, a local attorney backed by business interests, has filed for mayor of Kalispell. The Northwest Montana Association of Realtors has hired as its director of government affairs John Sinrud, a former Bozeman legislator with a reputation for very conservative politics. Critics of the Lakeside planning process have sued to bring it to a halt, and to gut the county planning office. And next year, we can expect a vigorous and lavishly bankrolled challenge to County Commissioner Joe Brenneman, a Democrat who is reviled by property rights wingnuts.

The nation is moving to the left, but the Flathead is lurching to the right.