Updated. Mike Jopek’s thoughts on the county’s survey of landowners in the ring of lands around Whitefish in which the city wants zoning power are below. I thank Mike for granting permission to publish his essay on Flathead Memo. Ed McGrew’s Informed Whitefish and the Montana Cowgirl blog are other sites you’ll want to visit. And you’ll want to read the comments that Citizens for a Better Flathead submitted to the commissioners.
Flathead County sent the survey to the owners of the land in the annulus, not to the people living in the annulus, or the registered voters living in the annulus.The survey went to the owners of the land, even to residents of foreign nations and to corporations.
Given all addresses and land in the county are geo-referenced, identifying just the registered voters in the annulus could not have been an overwhelming difficulty, so it’s hard to believe that the decision to survey only landowners was one of convenience and not of political philosophy: that the commissioners believe that only landowners should have a say on laws governing the use of land.
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. Once only landowners did have the vote — and those landowners had to be white men. There are those who think that’s how things should be today.
As for whether cities should have the right to zone territory adjacent to the city limits, there are powerful arguments on both sides. As a practical matter, cities grow by annexing adjacent lands, and thus have an interest in uniform zones, building codes, and such. As a philosophical matter, citizens should have the right to fully participate in the governments under which they live. Citizens in the zoning annuluses next to cities have have that right in county governments, but not in the cities inside the zoning annuluses.
Flathead County should have hired an out-of-state polling firm to survey the people in the Whitefish annulus. Now it should collect the returned surveys, open them not, burn them in a public ceremony, and promise to never again abuse democracy in this manner.
Picked up my mail today and received a survey ballot from Flathead County. Oddly this was not mailed to voters, so I decided to see who actually will receive these ballots. You may be surprised by what I learned.
The County courteously told me in an enclosed letter that “The ballot surveys will be counted by County officials and monitored in the same way as mail-in ballot is processed.”
This left me curious as to why some of my neighbors received two ballots while others received one, or worse no ballots.
By Mike Jopek
Instead of mailing ballots to the nearly 2,000 voters in the Whitefish extraterritorial planning jurisdiction, Flathead County chose to only mail surveys to the over 3,000 landowners.
Corporations can vote in this survey but renters cannot. Whitefish is 45 percent renters, Flathead County is 27 percent and Montana is 31 percent.
Most of the surveys that the County mailed went to owners who do not live in Whitefish.
Shockingly only half of the surveys were mailed into the Whitefish extraterritorial planning jurisdiction. The other half surveys owners who do not live on their Whitefish property but live or do business in places like Dallas, Missoula, Helena, California, Texas, Canada, Switzerland or England.
Forty percent of the survey votes were actually mailed out of Montana. Flathead County surveys our Canadian friends 300 times. Texas gets 70 votes, Missoula 60, and California got nearly 160 surveys.
One had to be fortunate enough to own Whitefish land to get a vote on this planning issue. But well over a hundred corporations and landowners with multiple parcels, get multiple votes.
Renters got no vote on the County survey. Only real property wealth counts.
Renters of the area deserve a vote on planning issues like clean water, safe routes to schools, development density, sidewalks, streets, trails, nighttime lighting, outdoor noise, or recreational access to public lands and public waterways.
Only allowing landowners the right to vote really did not work so well for America in the past.
A handful of Whitefish land speculators may well spend tens of thousands of political advertising dollars from now to after Election Day –betting to reap millions in short term profits.
It is time for a fair survey. Flathead County or the City of Whitefish can mail real ballots anytime to all 2000 voters in the extraterritorial planning jurisdiction. Allow a third option for the planning jurisdiction vote, an “elected citizen’s council.” A planning council works quiet well in other parts of the Flathead.