The finalizing of a new land use plan is in many ways, just the end of the beginning.

Park County Planning Director Joy Hill reiterated to a group of people who filed into chairs at the Heart Mountain Hall on Tuesday that finalizing a new land use plan would lead to the start of discussions she knew would be much more contentious: regulations.

“When we get down to the regs, we know that’s when people are really going to disagree,” Hill said.

The plan does, however, point to the possible regulations that would be introduced. In the area around Powell, that means increasing minimum lot sizes for a huge swath of land now zoned for 1 acre minimum lot sizes, while potentially allowing even smaller lots on the land closest to the city limits.

The plan, which draws on recommendations from county and municipal governments, experts in a variety of fields from ag to real estate, and input from hundreds of county residents, calls for protecting the character of rural lands by protecting irrigated ag land and driving future development to areas near cities, which already have the infrastructure to accommodate them and potentially annex into city limits.

The devil, however, will be in the details, as Heart Mountain farmer and Land Use Plan Advisory Council member Kelly Spiering noted Tuesday during the midday meeting.

“I support allowing small lots in the county so a farmer can break off some 2 acre lots and then hold on to the large acreage,” he said. “Cluster lots can be helpful in keeping that ag character.”

Hill said the plan, and thus the drive of potential regulations off of it, would allow that type of subdivision.

“We’re not saying you can’t make small lots in rural areas,” she said, adding that the subdivision would just need to be balanced by keeping one large lot for farming.

For instance, if a farmer with 300 acres wanted to break off five 2 acre lots for a small subdivision, he could do that under regs requiring a minimum 35 acre lot size average on a subdivision, as the six-lot subdivision  would have an average lot size of more than 50 acres.

Another big concern that has led people throughout the land use plan process to argue for more regulations to limit rural subdivisions has been the concern over there being enough available water.

The land use plan includes a goal to ask for a more localized aquifer analysis, as the federal studies done recently, Hill said, are not detailed enough to be of use to planners in determining what specific areas have adequate water for wells.

Spiering said with the proliferation of pivot sprinklers amongst the farming community the local aquifers are not getting the regeneration they do from flood irrigation, as he said sprinklers only water enough for the crop to grow. He suggested that be a reason for new subdivisions in more rural areas to set up their own water infrastructure instead of simply relying on each lot being serviced by a well.

Land use plan consultant Darcie White, who traveled from Colorado for the public input meetings in Powell and Cody, said that concern was why they want to drive development near cities, which have infrastructure in place to provide potable water from the Shoshone Municipal Pipeline. And while there may be concern about the aquifers suffering from a proliferation of wells and less flood irrigation, the pipeline has plenty of untapped capacity and can send out much more water than it currently is, pipeline manager Craig Barsness noted during an early phase off the lands use plan process.