A citizen-initiated petition to form a zoning district in Gallatin Gateway was unanimously denied by the Gallatin County Commission on Tuesday, citing their larger ambitions for county-wide zoning.
About 2,200 acres between South Cottonwood Road to Little Bear Road and on both sides of the highway were proposed to be zoned to prevent further unanticipated development — spurred by the recent approval of a gravel pit along U.S. Highway 191.
“Zoning protects our property values by keeping incompatible or unsuitable uses away from our properties,” Tracy Gibbons, the president of the Gateway Conservation Alliance said. “Zoning facilitates attractive growth with community involvement… regulates home occupations as residents are protected from incompatible use (and) protects residential properties from commercial development or industrial development.”
Around 30 people attended the public meeting and several voiced their support for the proposal, raising concerns that further development in Gallatin Gateway could impact viewsheds, the environment and property values.
Although the group received signatures from at least 60% of the to-be-encumbered landowners to successfully petition the commissioners, opposing large tract owners alleged that they were being muscled into zoning regulations for the benefit of others.
“It’s obviously a difficult path for this community to find consensus and I think this commission, and previous commissions decades in the past, have struggled with trying to manage competing and divergent expectations, philosophies, ideologies and diverging opinions,” Commissioner Zach Brown said. “It’s led us to this point today where we don’t have a clear path forward.”
Much of the drive behind the zoning proposal was instigated by the approval of the gravel pit along Highway 191, co-owned by Bayard Black. The pit, managed by TMC Inc. will excavate 6 million cubic yards of gravel on 130 acres over the next two decades and has caused commotion in the small community, as previously reported by the Chronicle.
Despite understanding that the approval of a new zoning district would have no impact on the gravel pit, residents said they had turned their attention to the future, hoping to gain further control over development in the area.
“We have hundreds more acres down there that could overnight become another one of these gravel pits,” Larry Wilcox, a supporting resident, said. “We would like some limitations put on what can happen.”
Black attended Tuesday’s meeting, along with his father, Doug Black, to oppose the zoning district as his property was included in the draft.
“This seems like mob rule to me,” he said. “If the majority can decide what we can do with our property, what’s to stop them 20 years from now saying, ‘Well, no one can own more than 20 acres’... that seems where this is headed… and we’re watching all the small family farms just get pushed out.”.
The commissioners acknowledged and related to concerns mentioned by both sides, but ultimately said that the proposed district was not in the best interest of the larger community.
“This very small circle — around 2,000 acres — does not constitute a very thoughtful land use regulation approach and more than likely will have the unintended consequence of pushing development pressure… further south towards the mouth of the canyon,” Brown said.
All three commissioners agreed that adding yet another zoning district to Gallatin County’s existing 22 would only further complicate an already inconsistent concoction of regulations, emphasizing that moving in the direction of county-wide zoning will ultimately be best for the county.
“Our planning department is trying to manage and administer 22 separate zoning districts, many of which have different regulatory frameworks, definitions, processes, rules, intentions, focuses,” Brown said. “Of those 22 diverging interests, many of them came from this kind of a community conflict that we’re experiencing today where zoning was proposed to solve the neighborhood scale problem. We need to zoom out and say what are our community-wide issues?”
Commissioner Jennifer Boyer added that if the county hadn’t recently launched a future land use map initiative to assess current and future land uses, she may have been more inclined to approve the petition.
Ultimately, she said a county-wide focus and the new initiative are “a better way to balance the values of our community, to consider the impacts on property rights holistically and to think about the fiscal health of our community and how we’re going to serve our citizens.”