Polson officials gear up for Wal-Mart hearing

It all comes down to next week.

The Polson City Council will play host to what should be the final Wal-Mart public meeting next Thursday, June 29, in which council members will decide the fate of the proposed supercenter as they weigh questions of annexation, zoning and a request to subdivide the property just south of the city.

The meeting will start at 6 p.m. at the Polson High School, the site of last month's Polson city/county planning board meeting. At that meeting, board members approved a special-use permit and recommended approval of the subdivision request, but said the proposed supercenter design was out of character with the neighborhood, and recommended denying the zoning request.

As expected, the question of whether Wal-Mart officials will be able to proceed with their supercenter will largely be left to Polson city councilmen. Although the planning board had the authority to approve a special-use permit, it could only provide recommendations on the subdivision and zoning request, while the city council has the authority to approve or deny those two issues.

But the planning board did not have to consider a request to annex the property into the city limits, and that will be the first thing the city council considers, because if it does not annex the property into city limits, the other two items are irrelevant, mayor Randy Ingram noted.

"If that annexation request fails, then there's probably no reason to continue [with the meeting] because we don't have the authority to make zoning changes on land the city doesn't own," he said.

Wal-Mart officials need the property annexed into the city so that they can hook up to city water and sewer. However, it could be the zoning request that draws the most debate, as Wal-Mart needs the area zoned for commercial use, even though it is currently zoned for residential.

"By the letter of the law, the public hearing is on the zone change," Ingram said.

However, he's certain folks will want to talk about other aspects of the supercenter, he said. The proposed supercenter would be about 156,000 square feet, and have a tire and lube facility, a full grocery store, and other amenities the current store doesn't offer. Critics of the proposed supercenter say it would be a blight on Polson's rural character, and hurt other, established businesses. Proponents say that it will allow families on a budget to save money, and prevent money from being spent in Missoula and Kalispell, as well as create more jobs here.

To address these issues, the Polson city council will be following a format that was similar to last month's planning board meeting, in which people who want to speak must sign up prior to the meeting, and will probably be kept to a specified time limit.

These and other procedures are outlined in the Polson Development Code under "hearing procedures," and Ingram said the city council will try to follow them as closely as possible. Those procedures include additional measures that can be taken - such as asking people to sign up to speak, and limiting the time limit - for controversial meetings, according to the PDC.

The council will hear public feedback first, and then move into the decision-making part of the meeting, Ingram said.

Ingram noted that while this is an emotional issue for many people, the city council must look at the PDC and evaluate the zoning request and other issues in light of what the PDC says.

"We have to look at the Polson Development Code, and filter through the emotion and find out exactly what the issues are, as they relate to the PDC," he said. "Sometimes that's very hard for folks to understand - that we can't base our decision on emotion. We have to base it on the PDC."

At last month's meeting, planning board members recommended rejecting the zoning request based largely on the opinion that the proposed store design was out of character with the existing setting. However, Wal-Mart officials said they'd be happy to go back to the drawing board and come up with a design more suitable for a rural area - an issue they've confronted before.

For the mayor and city council, next week's meeting will probably be the culmination of months of formal and informal feedback. Ingram said his office has received hundreds of letters and e-mails, some of them very emotional, on the subject.

"The majority of them are fair comments. However, many of them are based more on emotion than interpretation of the facts, which is the way the council has to address it," he said of the decisions facing them.

Many of the current city councilman have said that in daily conversations, most people have demanded to know how they will vote, but almost all of them have said they won't make a decision until they discuss and analyze all the data. And whatever decision they make, there are going to be some unhappy people.

"For most of the folks out there this is a very difficult issue. This is not going to be a fun public hearing. It's a classic 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation," Ingram said. "Regardless of what we do half the people are going to be very angry and half the people are going to be happy."