Sandpoint Council approves updated Comp Plan

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

The city of Sandpoint has its first updated Comprehensive Plan in 15 years, after City Council members unanimously approved the final draft of the document at their regular July 17 meeting.

“I am very proud. We all stand on the shoulders of people who have worked on this for years,” Mayor Jeremy Grimm said prior to the vote, which was met with a round of applause from council members.

According to Idaho statute, comp plans must be updated every 10 years so that they retain their relevance to the communities whose growth and development they guide. The effort on the previous plan took 20 months between 2008 and 2009. Achieving the most recent update, however, took much longer.

Photo by Ben Olson.

According to the staff report provided to council members, the process of revising the Comp Plan began in October 2019 — “right within the timeframe described by state law” — and included the swift adoption of a new chapter on the Sandpoint Airport in December 2019.

The project continued at “a fever pace” into the first months of 2020, until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 resulted in a pause that lasted for the following two years. At the same time, “turnover on city staff further stinted progress on the effort,” the staff report stated.

The Planning and Zoning Commission and City Council restarted the project in 2022, with a series of open houses, workshops and even a full public hearing following in 2023. 

The council came close to approving the final draft in October 2023, but tabled the decision to seek further feedback and allow for the new mayor and council members to work on the document. 

Town hall-style workshops took place in winter 2023 and spring 2024, alongside three joint working sessions with members of the council and P&Z, during which officials went through the document chapter by chapter, and often paragraph by paragraph.

Those efforts resulted in the final draft approved July 17.

According to a presentation from Community Planning and Development Director Jason Welker, whose appointment to the position by the mayor was confirmed by the council later in the meeting, the plan came to fruition after eight community events; 11 online activities; 31 interviews with stakeholders; 26 meetings of boards, commissions and steering committees; and 1,145 survey responses. 

“This draft has seen a lot of refinement,” he said.

The plan consists of about 140 pages including chapters covering community vision, character and design; land use and growth; housing and neighborhoods; multimodal transportation; parks, recreation and trails; public facilities, services and utilities; jobs and economic development; the airport; and natural resources and hazards.

Welker ticked off the components, noting that the document contains 45 goals, more than 200 objectives, and 60 projects and other plans growing out of those goals and objectives — and were also informed by the city’s various master plans — intended to provide a 20-year vision for the future of Sandpoint.

Among the highlights of the updated plan compared to the previous version, Welker noted, was greater emphasis on inclusivity, community engagement, sustainability and resilience, population projections (with a “conservative estimate” of 15,000 residents by 2040), land use and housing, economic diversity and responsive government.

“Since this new council started there’s been a heightened emphasis on community engagement,” Welker said, later adding, “The responsive government side is huge.”

Overall, according to one slide shared by Welker, “While the 2009 plan focused on preserving Sandpoint’s small-town charm and managing growth within compact urban centers, the 2024 plan envisions a more inclusive, sustainable and resilient future with a strong emphasis on community engagement, economic diversity and sustainable development principles.”  

The council did make a few changes prior to adoption, including stressing the urgency of moving forward on upgrades to the wastewater treatment system by making it a short-term priority, creating a separate portion in the implementation plan for the Little Sand Creek Watershed Master Plan and adding the definition of a “heritage tree” to the index.

“This plan represents a unifying document,” Grimm said, later adding that it “represents, in my opinion, our marching orders — all elected officials and employees of the city.”

View the document at bit.ly/3OaBXxH.