City Hall opts to eliminate Sandpoint area of impact

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Members of the Sandpoint City Council voted unanimously Aug. 6 to eliminate the city’s area of impact. The decision followed a recommendation July 15 from the Planning and Zoning Commission, and will be forwarded to the Bonner County board of commissioners for final approval.

City officials began contemplating a reduction in the area of impact in 2019, during the beginning phases of the Comprehensive Plan update, which was finished in July 2024. The P&Z Commission recommended in March that the area of impact be reduced from 12.3 square miles to 3.4 square miles, with the boundary lines drawn no farther than two miles from city limits.

However, between the completion of the Comp Plan and the P&Z meeting in March, the Idaho Legislature adopted new state code language stipulating that “an area of impact shall not exceed the areas that are very likely to be annexed to the city within the next five years.”

“This is the language that was added to state law that has kind of thrown a wrench in our plans,” Planning and Community Development Director Jason Welker told the council on Aug. 6.

The proposal to eliminate Sandpoint’s area of impact altogether came after Bonner County commissioners rejected the 3.4-square-mile boundary realignment in June, sending it back to the city for further refinement to more accurately reflect how and where growth could occur in the near future.

“Might some of these properties be annexed into the city of Sandpoint in the next five years? Sure, but it’s not likely that the city’s going to initiate annexation of any of these properties,” Welker said on Aug. 6. 

“If a property owner within any area adjacent to existing city limits that’s required for annexation were to request to be annexed, that’s something that could be brought to the council and brought to the county commissioners,” he added. “But we couldn’t honestly look at the commissioners and say that we as a city are very likely to engage in annexation of these properties.”

Because City Hall doesn’t — and can’t — know which properties within the area of impact are “very likely to be annexed,” retaining those lines on the map would be pointless, officials determined.

Describing the previous area of impact as “toothless,” Sandpoint Mayor Jeremy Grimm pointed out that while the pre-2024 state statues obligated counties to provide notice of development within cities’ areas of impact and take comment, “we’ve made comments throughout the years that have been just ignored,” he said. Furthermore, state statute doesn’t grant cities any jurisdictional authority at all within their areas of impact. 

“The real benefit of it was that we could have said, ‘Hey, our new street right-of-way standard is 50 feet. If this is ever coming into the city, we want this development to be compliant. Please make it 50-foot,’ something along those lines, or, ‘Please reserve a waterline easement or a sewer line easement,’” he added. “So, in my opinion, the fact that it was so toothless and wasn’t really supported, I don’t see any negative ramifications [to eliminating it entirely].”

City Attorney Fonda Jovick said that one of the benefits of areas of impact is that they provide the opportunity for creating a “buffer” for communities that are rapidly urbanizing.

“So when you have cities racing across a large vast of land toward each other, you can kind of protect your jurisdictional boundaries with your area of impact,” she said. “It’s your buffer from another city being on top of you. That is a conversation in other, larger urbanizing areas. I don’t see it as much of a threat for Sandpoint.”

Grimm pointed to the area north of the Bonner County Fairgrounds, outside city limits, where “without an area of impact defining that as ours, Ponderay could sweet talk the U of I property up there or some of those other properties off of Bronx and effectively get this area to annex into Ponderay, so that — again, the legislation has limited it, but in theory without an area of impact we could be surrounded by Ponderay if they offer maybe lower impact fees or better services. We could be basically surrounded by Dover and Ponderay without an area of impact.”

Welker noted that no part of Ponderay’s proposed area of impact crosses Sand Creek and so would need to be amended for that to happen, though Grimm repeated, “in the absence of any defined area of impact, it’s a free-for-all to some degree. And I guess that could be advantageous. We could go try to work on property owners north of Ponderay and encourage them to annex into Sandpoint. We could try to surround Ponderay — amend our area of impact — and so it’s an interesting moment. …

“I think it’s better to work with the county and ideally at some point start to have more robust conversations with the county planners and county commissioners about how that area develops,” he later added.