County starts order to okay building on buttes

Whitman County commissioners are moving forward with plans to remove restrictions on building homes atop the county’s 15 buttes.

Commissioners during their regular meeting Tuesday directed Planner Alan Thomson to begin the public process to change the code.

Building higher than 2,000-feet in elevation on buttes was declared off limits in the 2007 revisions to the county’s code regulating home construction in the agricultural zone.

Commissioners opened up the idea of removing those restrictions in April, after receiving an application from Walter Lunsford to build a new home on Parker Butte south of Palouse. Lunsford’s site sits above 2,660 feet.

Rick Kiesz of Thornton was in attendance at Tuesday’s meeting. Kiesz was an outspoken critic of the county’s industrial wind farm ordinance. His wife Carolyn filed an appeal of the ordinance, but it was rejected in Whitman County Superior Court.

Following the initial April discussion, Kiesz questioned if removing the butte protection clause was being brought up to allow construction of wind turbines atop buttes.

“I want to assure you that it is a coincidence that the butte ordinance and the windmills came up at the same time,” Commissioner Greg Partch said to Kiesz Tuesday.

Partch said he was against the butte protection clause from the time it was brought up.

Kiesz said his coffee group in Rosalia discussed it and none could remember Partch expressing that sentiment when the revised ag zone code was passed.

County commissioners opted to craft changes to butte zoning law themselves to speed the process. Typically, changes to county code are sent to the planning commission, which then issues a recommendation to county commissioners.

The butte protection clause is one of three planning issues commissioners Tuesday directed Thomson to prepare to bring before them.

Donald Schneider has asked the county to change the zoning designation on his property east of Pullman.

Schneider wants the designation on his land changed from the Pullman-Moscow Corridor zone to agricultural. The change would allow development of the land, likely housing according to Thomson.

The Schneider parcel, however, is surrounded by land owned by the Hanshaw and Moser families that is also in the corridor zone.

Zone designations on the Hanshaw and Moser properties would also need to be changed to put Schneider’s property adjacent to the ag zone. Without the change to all three parcels, the Schneider land would be what Thomson called a “spot zone,” which is forbidden by state law.

“We can’t do that,” said Thomson.

Thomson was slated to discuss the zone change with the county planning commission at its June 2 meeting to see how to proceed.

The third change would allow a hearing examiner to issue permits on large developments like wind farms in lieu of the county’s Board of Adjustment. An arbiter experienced in complicated land use regulations would be more likely to issue speedy decisions than the volunteer board.

Thomson will first have to determine the environmental impact of each of the three code changes under the State Environmental Policy Act. Public hearings will then have to be held on the changes before commissioners make their final decisions.