The Board of County Commissioners approved Clagstone Country Estates on the fourteenth of August. All three of them, in favor. Bruce Mattare chairing, Leslie Duncan and Marc Eberlein alongside him. The Order of Decision came back signed a couple of weeks after that, and I have spent the time since reading it rather than celebrating it.
I want to put the timeline down first, because it is the part nobody sees.
Four years and ten months from the first conversation to the vote. Some of that was ours, working out what this ground should become. A good deal of it was the ordinary pace of doing it properly.
What the county approved
Fifty-eight homesites on roughly three hundred and ninety-nine acres, in the Rural zone, designated Country on the county’s Future Land Use Map. Alongside the homesites: two open space tracts, one of twenty acres and one small one near the entrance, a tract for the utilities, and a tract at the road for the school bus stop and the mailboxes.
The Rural zone sets a five acre minimum. Most of these are over six, which was a deliberate choice and one I will write about on its own sometime.
The part I am proudest of
The approval includes pedestrian and equestrian pathways. Not only along the road rights-of-way, but running between the homesites, and the Homeowners Association maintains them under the covenants. That is now a condition of the approval rather than a promise in a brochure, which means it does not depend on anyone’s goodwill later, including mine.
The Hearing Examiner’s own analysis is the thing I keep going back to. Out of everything in the file, the examiner picked out two features as reflecting “an awareness and sensitivity to the natural environment”: the open space, and the pedestrian and equestrian trails that encompass the property. Those two, together, are what the county found justified the density of the plan.
The twenty acre open space tract was a voluntary dedication. Nobody required it of us. I would rather give up a couple of homesites than build a place where the only ground you can walk is your own.
What the file says about the ground
The county’s findings describe the property as relatively flat, with approximately twenty-four feet of elevation change across the whole of it and every slope under fifteen percent. That figure is ours, out of the narrative we submitted with the application. Kootenai County’s own 2019 LiDAR, which reads bare ground rather than treetops at roughly twenty thousand points inside each homesite, puts the total fall at twenty-nine feet, from about 2,485 feet to 2,514 feet. Two sources that had no reason to agree, five feet apart. For four hundred acres in North Idaho that is unusually level ground, and it is the reason the roads and the utilities lay out as cleanly as they do.
The timber is a mixed stand, mostly Ponderosa and Lodgepole Pine. There are no streams and no seasonal drainages, and no wetlands under the National Wetlands Inventory. The property does not sit in a special flood hazard area. The soils are predominantly Kootenai-Bonner complex with smaller areas of Bonner ashy silt loam, and the county found them suitable for residential development.
None of that is exciting to read. All of it is the sort of thing you want established in writing before you buy land.
Who else signed off
Timberlake Fire Protection District approved the request. Kootenai County EMS approved it. The Lakeland School District’s response, in full, was that the district is “neutral on this issue and has no concerns.” The interior roads will be built to Associated Highway District Standards and dedicated to the public in the name of Lakes Highway District, so they are plowed and maintained by the district rather than by an association that might run short of money in fifteen years.
A condition I did not expect to like
Idaho Fish and Game asked for language on the plat or in the covenants discouraging the planting of yew. It turns out the four yew species people commonly buy for landscaping are toxic to deer, elk, horses, dogs, cats and to us, and Fish and Game has been losing big game to it. The same conditions ask for bear-proof garbage storage and some plain guidance about not feeding wildlife.
It is a small thing to write into a set of covenants. It is also the kind of condition that only exists because somebody at the state looked at a forested subdivision and thought about what would still be living here in thirty years.
Water, and what the county decided about it
The commissioners spent most of their deliberation on water, and their reasoning is worth repeating because it went further than I expected. They concluded that a community system built to the state’s public water system standards is the more environmentally sound approach, rather than fifty-eight separate wells, because a single regulated system means groundwater conditions in the area can actually be monitored. That is the option we have been pursuing and it is the option we want.
The county wrote a contingency around it. The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality has twelve months from this approval to review and approve the system, and if that window closes without a formal approval, we retain the ability to develop with individual wells on each homesite. I would rather be straight about that than have somebody find it in the file later. A community system is the plan and it is what the county prefers; the fallback exists so that the project is not held hostage to a review queue.
There is one more condition on this worth knowing, and I think it is a sensible one. We are not permitted to simply post a bond against the system’s wells and sort them out later. The wells have to be physically drilled, with the driller’s report showing what they actually produce, before the county will approve a final plat. No promises on paper where water is concerned.
What this is, precisely
This is preliminary plat approval, with nineteen conditions attached to it. It is not a recorded plat, and I am not going to describe it as one. Every one of those conditions has to be satisfied, and the final plat is its own separate application after that. Preliminary approval runs twenty-four months from the signing of the Order, with one automatic two year extension once the first phase records.
So there is a good deal of work between here and a deed with your name on it. But the questions that could have stopped this, whether the ground is suitable, whether the density belongs here, whether the agencies with jurisdiction could live with it, have been asked in public and answered on the record. That was the part I could not promise anybody until now.