P&Z Backs Family Land Division Exemption

DRIGGS — The Teton County Planning and Zoning Commission voted unanimously Tuesday night to recommend a family land division exemption that would let longtime landowners split off as many as four parcels for close family without going through subdivision review.

A May 27 working copy of the ordinance would have barred a recipient who sold within five years from getting a building permit on the parcel until ten years had passed from the date the division was recorded. Permits issued to the recipient could not be transferred. The new parcels would have been subject to a lien or a deed restriction to enforce the holding period, though the draft did not say which.

The version that went to hearing Tuesday contains none of those provisions.

Commission Chairman Wyatt Penfold, a third-generation valley farmer, said the exemption was "going to be a pain in the butt to police and keep track of," pointing to the resale restriction and the ten-year permit bar. "That's all gone, Wyatt," planning administrator Joshua Chase told him. "We've eliminated all the back end stuff."

The May draft set a flat five-acre average density "regardless of the underlying zoning." The current text requires each new parcel to meet the underlying zoning for average density, with a one-acre minimum. Planning staff wrote that the commission modified the earlier approach "to require compliance with zoning as written in the current version," and described the proposal as "focused now on simplicity of process" where earlier drafts had set zoning aside based on how long an owner had held the land. Vice-Chairman James Weber, who ran Tuesday's meeting, said the commission had gone back to "the underlying zoning component" a couple of meetings earlier, and that doing so "took away a lot of these other things that we had because of that."

The ordinance would add a family land division section to the county's Land Development Code, allowing a landowner to convey parcels to a parent, child, grandparent or grandchild. The land must have been in the same ownership for ten years. A parcel already divided this way cannot be divided again by a later owner. Parcels inside a city area of impact are excluded until those cities adopt matching rules.

The ordinance describes the cap twice, in different words. One subsection bars a family land division from creating "more than four (4) parcels"; another limits it to "a total of four (4) lots." Neither says whether the remainder an owner keeps counts toward the number, which is the difference between four new lots and three.

Review would be administrative. Instead of a public hearing, the administrator or a designee would issue a written decision. County commissioners directed staff to take that approach, according to the staff report, which noted the change may affect "the opportunity for participation in a review process by potentially affected adjacent landowners." "The county notifies when an application is going to be considered by the Planning Commission, but there's no Planning Commission meeting," Chase told the commission. "So maybe you want to notice the neighbors of the staff decision."

In the last minutes of the meeting, the commission attached five amendments to its recommendation. One requires that neighbors be notified after the administrator issues a decision.

The other four struck a provision requiring a business entity that holds the land to be at least 80% owned by one person, couple or trust; added siblings to the list of eligible recipients; asked for consistent use of "parcels" and "lots"; and corrected boilerplate in the ordinance's closing sections that referred to the Iona City Code. That language came from the county's outside counsel, Chase said, "who also has Iona City as a client."

Penfold, who moved the amendments, said the 80% threshold "takes my farm right out of it." Most farms he knows are not held that way, he said: "any major decisions in a corporation is done by 51%." On siblings, he said that "if one guy owns all the land like me, I'll be the majority shareholder on the land. But if I want to give it to one of my siblings that doesn't have stock, I should be able to do that."

Six people testified, several of them farmers and ranchers. Trevor Ricks, who farms near Felt, said he was "in favor of being able to sell a corner off to somebody who's not my family." Lan Hertz said it "would be good to have an option to open it up beyond just family members." The commission weighed striking the family requirement and declined.

Planning staff modeled the ordinance on Kootenai County's, which has been in effect more than a year and has produced about two dozen divisions, according to the staff report. Staff also borrowed language from Teton County, Wyoming, where state law requires counties to allow the practice.

What to watch: The recommendation goes to the county commissioners, who must hold their own public hearing before they can adopt the ordinance. Chase said that hearing is already scheduled, though the county had not posted an agenda for it as of Wednesday. The commissioners' next regularly scheduled meeting is Sept. 14.

County Planners Back a Family Land Division Exemption, Minus the Resale Limits It Started With

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