Kootenai County officials and consultants from SCJ Alliance opened a joint community development meeting Dec. 4 to launch a combined countywide comprehensive plan and the county’s first parks and recreation master plan.

The kickoff laid out an aggressive public‑engagement schedule, a data‑driven community profile and initial parks and waterways findings, and raised early questions about how to pay for park maintenance and infrastructure as the county grows. Aaron Qualls, a consultant with SCJ Alliance, said a comprehensive plan is intended to be “a 20‑year vision by and for the community” that provides the legal basis for future zoning and subdivision regulations and supports capital planning and grant applications.

Qualls said the team has completed a community profile and nearly finished a parks assessment and hopes to hold the first public engagement event within weeks. The project will include orientation interviews with community leaders, broad public surveys and interactive outreach such as scenario boards and “penny polls” to surface priorities and tradeoffs.

Mark Garf, a senior landscape architect working with SCJ Alliance, described the parks element as a countywide inventory and long‑range roadmap to identify gaps in upland parks, playgrounds and trail connectivity. “It’s your road map for building a stronger, healthier, and more connected park system,” Garf said. He highlighted Kootenai County’s strong on‑water program, specialized staff and search-and‑rescue assets, and noted the county grooms about 300 miles of trails in winter, while upland parks and sports‑field programs are comparatively underdeveloped.

Data presented at the meeting cited regional projections used by local planners that could add roughly 148,000 residents across the metro area by 2045; using an average household size of 2.51, the presentation translated that into roughly 48,000 additional housing units countywide. Qualls also noted housing stock is dominated by single‑family homes with a relatively small share of so‑called “missing‑middle” housing types.

Speakers flagged several planning pressures. Qualls identified wildfire as the county’s primary hazard, followed by winter storms and flooding, and summarized concerns about sediment contamination and eutrophication risks in Lake Coeur d’Alene and the Spokane and Coeur d’Alene rivers. He also noted that parts of the county sit over a sensitive aquifer area and that recent local ordinances aim to protect the resource.

Funding emerged as a central theme of the discussion. Nick Snyder, director of Parks and Waterways, said a large portion of the department’s current revenue comes from vessel registration fees and a small parks levy. “At present most of our funding for our department comes through vessel registration,” Snyder said, adding that grants can cover initial capital work but rarely pay for ongoing maintenance. Participants and commissioners discussed policy tools including impact fees, local option or tourist taxes (noting state law limits), special park districts, sponsorships, volunteer maintenance programs and the political difficulty of raising taxes or new fees.

Commissioners and a number of residents stressed the need to pair planning for new parks with realistic maintenance funding and to consider county service levels, especially public safety, as growth continues. Qualls said the plan team will examine concurrency and levels‑of‑service policies and can help incorporate capital improvement planning into the comp plan where practical, while noting some elements of implementation fall to county leaders and partner agencies.

Next steps the team outlined include finalizing a public survey, vetting it with county staff, creating a dedicated project page on keepingkootenai.com and scheduling a heavily promoted first engagement event. The planning commission is expected to hold at least one public hearing and the Board of County Commissioners would adopt the plan by resolution later in the process.

No formal votes or motions were taken at the meeting; the session closed after the presentation and Q&A.