Sandpoint takes first step toward shrinking area of impact

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

The city of Sandpoint is looking to reduce its area of impact — shrinking the region for potential future expansion to a total of three square miles and limited to within two miles of city limits.

Members of the Sandpoint Planning and Zoning Commission voted unanimously March 18 to recommend adopting the new area of impact, which will next be considered by the City Council before going to the Bonner County commissioners for final approval.

The adjustment is the result of a law change approved by the 2024 Idaho Legislature, which sought to curtail the authority of cities to grow into their surrounding counties.

“The state of Idaho literally took cities out of the ‘area of city impact’ and changed the name to ‘area of impact,’” Sandpoint Planning and Community Development Director Jason Welker told P&Z commissioners. “[T]here’s very little jurisdictional authority of a city within an area of city impact or an area of impact. In fact, there’s no jurisdiction for cities within the areas of impact — this is a pure planning exercise. It’s about envisioning potential future expansion or growth.” 

The proposed new area of impact is 75% smaller than the existing area of city impact, which covers a total of 12.3 square miles and contains swathes of land that the city could not realistically serve with utilities.

“[These are] very rural areas that are not only unlikely but not even able to ever be served by city utilities,” Welker said, later adding that residents covered both by the current ACI and proposed A.I. should not expect to see any future moves toward annexation.

“Nothing would change for people living in this area; there’s no imminent annexation, it’s just the ability to possibly someday grow into this area and really that’s almost always citizen initiated — that would be at the request of residents of these neighborhoods, of these parts of rural Bonner County,” Welker said. “The city of Sandpoint has no intent to grow or annex these properties; it’s just if any of these property owners in the future desired to have city services, this is the framework by which that process would take place.”

According to City Attorney Fonda Jovick, the legislation was driven by the Idaho Association of Counties, which sought to address a number of legal disputes related to design and buildout activities around the state.

“The attempt was to create legislation that made it a little more clear and also reduced the cities’ ability to, if you will, overreach,” she said. “There were a lot of cities who had very expansive areas of city impact and the legislation was designed to force the cities to really look at that. … [I]t was really intended to force the cities to eliminate these overlapping areas of impact and have the county maintain authority and jurisdiction over the planning and development outside of the city jurisdictional boundaries.”

The deadline to have the new area of impact in place is Dec. 31. Meanwhile, Welker stressed repeatedly that the city has no plans to expand even into the smaller area of impact — in large part because of constraints stemming from Sandpoint’s outdated wastewater treatment plant.

“In five years we’re not going to have a wastewater plant built that can serve any new development,” he said. “We currently can’t serve new development with our wastewater plant — everybody here knows that that’s the biggest infrastructure challenge that we face, so no, I would not expect that we’ll be serving sewer in any new areas.”