Suce Creek Residents Successfully Zone Their Neighborhood

Looking over the Suce Creek neighborhood.

Our friends up Suce Creek received some good news today when the Park County Commissioners voted unanimously to approve their citizen initiated zoning district.

This vote comes nearly one year after PCEC alerted the community of a massive luxury resort development proposed in Suce Creek. In the meantime, the Suce Creek residents took matters into their own hands, as is their right in Montana — asking county officials to zone their neighborhood.

We applaud the commissioners for listening and doing right by Suce Creek residents. And we applaud residents for showing us how working together can pay off.

Now that it’s approved, the Suce Creek Zoning District can show us how zoning can be used to help manage growth in our county, with reasonable guidelines that are known and followed by all.

There are numerous examples in Park County of proposed projects, from gold mines to luxury developments, that have had the potential to change our county into something contrary to all we value and love about this place. We are a rural county with small-town sensibilities, and we have had to fight over and over again to keep it that way.

Many of these battles are exactly what our friends up Suce Creek have had to deal with in the last year. Our lack of regulations allow for these shortsighted ideas to take root, because we can’t say no to them outright, or even yes but. 

Park County’s newest zoning district is a step in the right direction for our county. It shows that zoning doesn’t have to be scary, or stop our rural lifestyles, or stop growth. The Suce Creek project shows that zoning can be reasonable, and it can be neighborly.  

It would be ideal if we could work together as a county to add this kind of predictability into managing development before the development happens. We need to be proactive, and it’s a perfectly responsible thing for us all to consider.

Approving this zoning district was the appropriate thing to do to honor the wishes of the Suce Creek residents. Going forward we will need to put our heads together and think about how we can do better for all of Park County to proactively address the threats of development in the future.