Before Park County Planning and Zoning commissioners are happy with passing on the final draft of the new land use plan to county commissioners, they wanted to ensure the plan wasn't a series of regulations in disguise.

On July 11, the Park County Planning and Zoning Commission and county commissioners gathered together for a workshop. The goal was to resolve issues the P&Z members had with the plan that had kept them from giving it a complete certification. That is needed to advance it toward final adoption.

Planning and zoning previously had multiple meetings to certify the plan, but with conditions still needing to be settled, the Tuesday meeting was called.

One of the big changes made at the work session was to tweak language regarding larger acreage minimums from saying the goal would be to "establish" larger acreage minimums in some areas to 20-35-acre minimums to instead "consider" those zoning changes.

“That needs to be done in zoning regulations and not the land use plan,” P&Z board member Duncan Bonine said of the change in semantics. “I think that's the issue because it’s not really suggestions, it’s mandating it."

Besides some grammatical changes, a couple of the big issues that had concerned P&Z members about the land use plan document, they told county commissioners, was in how it was being perceived by the public.

“We're getting a lot of feedback from the residents that they think we're taking their land,” P&Z chair Kimberley Wintermote said. “And so that's not what we want to do … In GRP (General Rural Powell) what people are perceiving happening in an ag overlay is right now you can subdivide up to 1 acre. If we do this, then it's going to be 20 acre lot sizes, and people are very unhappy with that thinking we’re stepping on their private property rights.”

What she said, and commissioners and Planning Director Joy Hill agreed with, is the necessity of making people more informed. Thus, commissioners and P&Z members agreed on language to more accurately specify the ways in which people can subdivide lots under 20 acres, such as by using lot size averaging and conservation subdivisions.

Hill said too, that the new land use plan is meant to provide for much finer slicing up of zones within areas, as opposed to just large chunks of 1 acre minimum lots, which currently cover everything from areas of large ag operations that are already well over 20 acres to areas around Powell that may be zoned for even more density. The new plan, she said, is meant to encourage more development where there already is development near the counties, cities, and towns.

She asked too whether Heart Mountain farmer and P&Z member Brian Peters thought the people who have talked with him would agree with 20 acre minimums in zoned ag land and he said they would probably want something smaller to provide more options if they needed to sell land.

Those zoning regulations are still in the future though, and Hill said the commissioners could choose to scrap 20 acre minimums altogether and go with a different number. She said it was still helpful for the plan to include numbers, as the definition of a “large lot” could vary greatly between people.

To view the proposed Park County Land Use Plan, visit parkcounty-wy.gov/PlanParkCounty/.