Missoulian - Flathead businesses ask county to protect the water

KALISPELL - Amid a renaissance of interest in the economic value of Flathead Lake, more than 100 businesses have fired a letter to Flathead County commissioners asking that land-use planning be better used to protect water quality.

“In Flathead County, clean water is a pocketbook issue,” said Rose Schwennesen, co-owner of Partners West Realty in Bigfork. “We owe it to our children and our future prosperity to wisely conserve our lakes, rivers and groundwater.”

The business people - local employers, owners and investors - range from bank presidents to homespun cottage industry, new-money investors to longtime locals.

Collectively, they have asked commissioners to protect wetlands, lake shores, stream banks and the valley's shallow groundwater. Specifically, they hope future planning efforts focus development near existing cities and sewer systems, keeping construction - and especially septic systems - well out of the flood plain.

The letter asks that developers be required to leave natural buffer strips along waterways, and that groundwater be protected from storm-water runoff and failed septics.

“It's much cheaper and more efficient to keep our water clean than to try to ‘un-pollute' it,” Schwennesen said, adding that the current growth policy process “gives us one chance to do it right.”

A growth policy is a countywide document that steers long-term growth, the modern version of what once were called master plans. Flathead County's master plan is decades old, and by all accounts badly outdated.

Currently, county officials are in the final throes of crafting a new growth policy, and it is that process the business leaders hope to influence with their letter.

They are not alone.

Rich Moy chairs the Flathead Basin Commission, a group formed by the Montana governor's office some 20 years ago in the face of upstream threats to Flathead water quality. Moy also heads the water division of the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.

On July 10, he addressed the annual meeting of the nonprofit Flathead Lakers.

“There appears to be no vision for what the Flathead Valley should look like in the future,” Moy told the Lakers. “Growth and new subdivisions just happen. No one appears to be pro-active in making the right decisions; a few are reacting to change, but most do nothing.”

There is, he said, “little long-range planning going on in the basin.”

Moy said he hoped the appeal to put protections into the upcoming growth policy would prove successful, “but I will not hold my breath.”

“What the basin needs,” he said, “is for the silent majority to take charge and create a clear vision of what the valley should look like in five years, 10 years, 50 years from now, and work to make that vision a reality.”

Which is precisely what the business owners hope to achieve with their letter to commissioners.

“Business people I talk to know that one of the things that makes the Flathead such a high-quality place is water resources like Flathead Lake,” said economist Larry Swanson, of the University of Montana's Center for the Rocky Mountain West. “To unduly degrade Flathead Lake through poorly planned development is both unnecessary and just plain bad economics.”

The economics of the lake are enjoying a high level of interest these days, prompting several studies into the value of clean waterways. That work is encouraged by Jack Stanford, long-time director of the University of Montana Flathead Lake Biological Station at Yellow Bay.

Work by UM economists, Stanford has said, puts the estimated value of Flathead Lake somewhere between $6 billion and $10 billion - an admittedly slippery number but one that all agree represents a major portion of the region's economy.

Stanford has studied the lake and its riverine network for decades, adding up its tremendous biological diversity, its job as pollution filter, as the literal veins of a landscape-sized creature he calls the “Crown of the Continent.”

He's looked at big, deep mountain lakes all around the world, and Flathead, he said, remains among the very cleanest.

But how to put a dollar amount on clean?

It's easy to say what coal in the Flathead's headwaters is worth, easy to say what a condo project on the lake's shore is worth. There's no trouble putting a price tag on the gravel pits that operate upstream, or the farmland pushed hard to the banks.

In fact, it is quite likely the ease with which such development can be quantified economically that has so many suddenly interested if there might not be a similar dollar value to, say, the filtering system that is aquifer and lake.

People are moving in, Stanford said, bringing their money with them, and they're attracted here because of places such as Flathead Lake. What is that worth?

Stanford is actively developing a system he hopes will help answer that question, balancing the development equation with intrinsic, yet still economic, values.

Because he, like the business people behind the letter, is increasingly convinced that there is a place where economics and conservation meet, a place where they are one and the same, and that place is Flathead Lake.

“Flathead Lake works for Flathead County communities, businesses and families,” economist Swanson said, “every day of every year.”

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