What will Bannock County look like in the coming decades? Rural communities want to stay rural
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POCATELLO — Rural residents of Bannock County have said what they want their future to look like.
The Bannock County Planning and Development Department is evaluating the data it gathered after a campaign to gather the responses of residents on what they want the future of their county to look like. Once the department is done going over that data, they’ll draft a new comprehensive plan for the next two decades, titled Comprehensive Plan 2040.
“The comprehensive plan is Bannock County’s vision for the future,” said Tristan Bourquin, assistant planning director.
Each city in Bannock County has its own comprehensive plan that city staff been working on. For the county, its focus is on its rural residents in unincorporated land and on the edges of cities.
To gather this information, the county held seven open houses, getting responses from 214 attendees in total, also receiving 42 written comments by people filling out fliers as well as email. The online survey the county put out received 778 responses.
The public was also shown a map of what future zoning in the county could look like, and people could say whether they agreed or disagreed with how an area would be zoned.
The department is in the early stages of evaluating the data.
“What are the main topics? What are the repeating phrases, repeating topics that people are most concerned about or least concerned about so that we can then draft goals and policies from that feedback?” Bourquin said.
One of the most recurring points in people’s comments was not to allow solar panels to be built in the county. These open houses were being held at the same time as the county commissioners were deciding what to do about two companies that wanted to bring solar panels to the Marsh Valley.
The commissioners have already passed an ordinance that bans large-scale solar and wind projects from being constructed in the county.
“Unfortunately, we have the two things kind of running concurrently, and so there was a lot of crossover in that snapshot response,” Bourquin said.
Just in the early stages, the department has already recognized some of the overarching themes in people’s responses.
“For the most part, I would say it’s improving and maintaining water quality, keeping your agricultural and rural residential areas the same, not having things get too dense, and then solar was a big one. Those are probably the three top comments that we received,” Bourquin said.
While most of the people who filled out flyers said that they didn’t want solar farms to come to the community, one respondent wrote that they would want that. Others wrote that they would like to see more electric vehicle charging stations in the county.
Another respondent said Marsh Valley should have a community recreation center located between Arimo and McCammon so that people in rural areas could access it.
The largest age demographic that responded to the online survey was people 65 and older, while the smallest demographic was people under 18. The largest income level that responded was people who made between $100,000 and $150,000 a year while the smallest was people who made under $15,000 a year.
“We do want look at what the overall demographics of the county versus the demographics of the respondents are,” Bourquin said. “And then does that actually match with what the age of respondents is, or are we not getting enough response from the actual majority of the county?”
Bourquin expects the planning and development department to finish evaluating the responses from community members over the course of a couple of months. She said the goal qaa to have a draft available for review would in August.
Bourquin hopes that over the next two decades, smaller cities in the county will see growth, but it will be manageable and not ruin the rural lifestyle that so many people enjoy.
“It would be nice to see not a ton of growth, but a little bit of growth. Just some sustainable growth in those areas to allow people to have the hobby farms that they want and to live in the rural communities and have it be sustainable and not have to drive 50 miles to go to work,” Bourquin said.