The following article was submitted to Montana 1st News by a highly concerned Bigfork resident. Quite frankly a lot of folks in Bigfork are concerned about the high possibility of imminent disaster as the Flathead County Commissioners recently approved the building of the Northshore Woods Subdivision in Bigfork, Montana and with it the very real concerns such a project will bring.
If you only read one article this year let it be this one.
Bigfork is becoming too big.
“Section 1.02. of Flathead County Zoning Regulations, 9/27/1993, states, “The purpose of these regulations is to promote the health, safety, and general welfare of the community.” In its October 2024, preliminary plat approval of the Northshore Woods (NW) subdivision in Bigfork, the County Commissioners used zoning laws to the opposite purpose: degrading and hindering the health, safety, and general welfare of the community after the Planning and Zoning Board had done the same, in a worse way, a year earlier. They have done so despite the community’s vigorous protests—hundreds of them–in public hearings, in letters and emails, and over the heads of the Bigfork Land Use Advisory Committee that knows far better than the Kalispell mandarins what Bigfork needs and wants.
Bigfork has a population of 5,000+, two MDs, no police force, a fire department of mostly volunteers, one school bursting-at-the-seams for each of the K-12 age groups, no street lighting or sidewalks except in the small downtown, one two-lane Highway 35 along which the town is strung out, and no public parking except in the limited spaces of the supermarket/shopping center, and downtown. In the summer, all that is swamped by tourists—from quarter-mile car queues where the stop sign regulates the turn from Hwy 82 to Hwy 35, to long caravans of cars moving slowly through Bigfork in both directions each on its single highway lane, to zero available parking. The Commission approved the building of 51 NW homes in a small, green valley sandwiched between Hwy 35, the Peaceful Acres subdivision, and Bigfork Stage Road. The county’s agreement with the developers leaves the door open for additional future buildouts, pending separate approvals.
The primary access road to those new homes is Peaceful Drive. It’s a single-outlet narrow loop, at 20-22’ width insufficient for two lanes, connecting the 60+ families living in Peaceful Acres to Highway 35. It serves their commuting, shopping, maintenance, and health requirements, their visitors, service automobiles, and medical emergency, firefighting, law enforcement, and rescue and evacuation needs. Near its approach to the highway, Peaceful Drive has a 20’ drop on one side where there is also a steep grade and blind corners. The topography does not allow for adding another lane nor another exit. A single construction truck, crane, etc. entering Peaceful Drive for the Northshore Woods project would compel any car trying to get out to back up hundreds of feet and wait until the large vehicle gets to the NW entry road. Left turns onto Hwy 35 can already take a couple of minutes of waiting time for a single car in the summer. The more cars waiting in that queue, the longer the wait. The Planning and Zoning Staff Report of 8/25/2024 estimates that just those 51 NW new households will increase traffic on Peaceful Drive by 275%.
But that’s just the surface of the lethal trap that our esteemed Commissioners have built with this subdivision.
The Peaceful Acres loop is thickly wooded. A 100-yard slope separates it from Bigfork Stage Road that has a dense forest on its eastern side. Stage Road is the designated secondary access to/from Northshore Woods, but anyone who’s driven that road knows that it has its own critical issues too that call for minimizing, not maximizing its traffic. The odds of a catastrophic fire in Bigfork are increasing every year, and the law of tens for wildfire spread in wind conditions tells that with a wind of 40 mph—a regular occurrence in Bigfork—a conflagration at the Bigfork Stage Road forest would reach the 110+ households of Peaceful Acres + NW in less than two minutes.
Imagine the evacuation scenario with all those people crammed in cars trying to reach Hwy 35 that is itself bumper-to-bumper and roasting alive as the fire gains on them.
If you think that it’s hyperbole, 72 of us sent a 15-page signed letter to the Commission on 7/15/2024, summarizing ten wildfires in the US and abroad in which people died roasted alive in their cars, unable to drive on because of inadequate evacuation roads. We provided links to 24 articles on the subject, including titles such as “How Paradise ignored warnings [about inadequate evacuation roads] and became a deathtrap [for 86 people]” (L.A. Times, 12/30/2008).
The Commissioners ignored it.
Input from public agencies that should have opined on this issue was nonexistent. The Flathead Road and Bridge Department did provide a one-paragraph comment that merely rubber stamped the developer’s traffic-related proposal which itself carefully avoided this very issue while also being contrary to the experience of Peaceful Acres drivers. Besides the above letter, at least a dozen of them expressed in writing and in multiple hearings their objections to these deficiencies. All this might have been acceptable if Bigfork needed or wanted this or any future subdivision. How much it doesn’t can be inferred from the fact that over 850 people signed a contra-NW petition after a single weekend’s sign-up at a makeshift outdoor table, last year. Contrariwise, the Commissioners and even more so the Board of Planning/Zoning are on record with statements that we need more and more housing because “we can’t keep them from coming”—though if we don’t build, they may come but if they can’t find “housing” they will have to move on. Besides, in mid-December 2024, there were 91 Bigfork homes on the market, 13 of which were below $500k. Even cheaper workforce housing is needed, but it’s a separate issue, handled differently.
Every large subdivision project in Flathead County is met with vociferous opposition of the people who live here, while the controlling authority does all it can to ram it through, over their heads. It’s even more egregious in Helena, where the legislature, with enthusiastic approval of the Governor—all “conservatives” putatively standing for people’s freedom—passed last year a flurry of Stalinist social engineering housing laws that seek to eliminate the people’s voice from housing development decisions, even overriding existing zoning laws. Limited space won’t allow me here to deconstruct the motivations in all that, but I’ll say this: two U.S. Supreme Court justices, Robert Jackson in 1949 and Arthur Goldberg in 1963, opined that the U.S. Constitution is not a suicide pact. If that is so, neither Flathead County’s zoning regulations nor Helena’s laws infringing on them should be construed as a sabotage pact.”
