Rural Powell resident Julie Thomas has no plans to sell her property east of Powell city limits. After all, other than her father’s nearby home, it’s just farm fields all around, some of them hers or her family’s. 

However, if she had to sell down the road she doesn’t want the added complications she said could come if the area was indeed zoned limited industrial as specified in the latest draft zoning map released by Park County planning and zoning, after work by the Park County Planning and Zoning Commission, consultants and county commissioners to revise an earlier draft map. 

In working with a couple of commissioners who agreed with her assessment, she boxed off her and her father’s land to label it General Rural 5 acre, as most of the land around it already is. 

“They basically said they think they messed up, so hopefully that’s the case,” Thomas said. “I don’t plan to sell, but if I do sell it, I need to have options.”

Similar situations were repeated a number of times Tuesday at public input sessions in Cody and Powell that each drew 50 or more people over the course of the day. 

Park County Commissioner Dossie Overfield said discussions have been civil and in Cody too, they were able to work with some landowners on a potential plan to change zoning lines to what landowners think more accurately reflects their usage. For instance, east of Cody a farmer asked to be moved to a zoning area with a smaller allowable lot size as he's putting in pivots and may want to carve out some small lots on the corners.

She said not all such requests will be able to be acted upon, but they’re trying. 

“We’ve had a lot of good conversations,” Overfield said. 

Not everyone had issues with how their property was zoned — Dan and Pam Myers said while there are issues in their community outside of town, they feel the General Rural 5 Acre zoning is applicable.

“I’m happy with what I’m seeing,” Dan said as the couple looked at land use tables. 

Another rural resident, Dave Benson, said while looking over zoning maps he didn’t see any big issues, but he was still curious as to why the process was happening at all. 

The current development standards and regulations, Park County Planning Director Joy Hill told the assembled crowd at Heart Mountain Hall, have been in place since 2000, “and the only things that have changed since 2000 are things that people have done zoning map amendments to change, so this map is largely unchanged since the year 2000.”

That includes, in rural Powell, a large amount of land zoned as General Rural Powell, which allows lots as small as 1 acre, even though, as Hill and others have said, there is not the infrastructure, including water, to actually divide all of that land into 1 acre lots. 

Transferring much of the area into GR-5 is just one of many changes from the previous map, but as Hill noted, this is not the final map. 

“This map is what we're proposing right now, is the latest draft of the zoning map for the county. This is not final. We still have a long way to go,” she said. “Tonight is the first step to gather more input. The next step is going to be the P&Z Commission public hearing with them, and then there will still be another public hearing with the Board of County Commissioners. So, there's still a couple review periods ahead to keep refining the map, but this set of meetings that we're having right now is very, very important, because this map has changed since the last draft that you saw, and we're getting closer to the end each time.”

Like Thomas, Debbie Christiansen, who has farmed land with her family east of town for as long as they can remember, asked for her property to be taken out of industrial zoning and into GR-5. 

Commissioner Scott Mangold pointed out that the county is required to have some industrial zoned land in each area, but even with multiple parcels being blocked off by pen on the paper map, there still remained some industrial land, much of it in areas already in what would qualify as industrial usage. 

Like Thomas,  Christiansen left hopeful.