PERSPECTIVES Mayor’s Roundtable:

By Mayor Shelby Rognstad Reader Contributor

It has been another busy year for the city of Sandpoint. The city is in a good state. The city started off 2022 by revising its five-year Strategic Plan. The plan focused on prioritizing city resources and balancing commitments across divisions.

A number of initiatives were identified to support housing availability and affordability. Included among those were completion of an economic study assessing housing and land use in the city. This assessment, conducted by Leland Consulting, was completed last summer and provided significant insight into land use strategies to encourage more housing, housing affordability and economic development. Also included was a directive to complete the city Comprehensive Land Use Plan update, which has been underway for the past year and should be complete in the coming months. This effort will also help direct her passion toward fixing something that actually is broken, rather than breaking something that is not.

The choice couldn’t be more clear. Please vote for Susan Shea on May 16.

Katharine Roser Sandpoint

Dear editor,

Anyone who’s traveled along the Clark Fork River can easily appreciate its beauty, however its scenic currents are tainted. Just outside of Frenchtown, Mont., the now closed Smurfit-Stone paper pulp mill spouted pollution for 53 years. To the eye the site is crumbling buildings that were once productive, an excess of gravel and crumbling concrete. The problems lie just below the surface. The soil remains contaminated with metals, dioxins, furans, polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) congeners and arsenic.

These toxins seep into the Clark Fork through groundwater and are actively contaminating the river, so much so that fish from the river are considered unsafe for consumption. Additionally, the site sits within the Clark Fork’s floodplain. Seasonal flooding can easily tear through Smurfit and drag all of these pollutants into the river, contaminating it even further.

In short, the Smurfit-Stone site is to meet housing needs and support economic development and quality of life in Sandpoint. Development of a Workforce Housing and Priority Plan was also identified. The city has initiated the process of developing a housing authority to create and implement such a plan, and we expect this process to be picking up steam by summer.

The strategic plan called for completion of the Watershed Recreation Plan, which has also been underway over the past year. A draft of the concept trails plan was just completed last week, and will be reviewed by stakeholders and the public before being presented to council for adoption in June.

This is an exciting achievement, since the vision to open up the city’s 4,000 acres of forested watershed to recreation has been underway for a decade and will significantly contribute to public access to open space and recreation opportunities.

Also ongoing is the updated Urban Area Transportation Plan, which not just polluting the river slowly, it is a powder keg of pollutants waiting to be set off.

As Montanans, we have the constitutional right to a “clean and healthful” environment. To achieve this environment the Smurfit site must be dealt with. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must move forward with clean up efforts to remove the toxins from the area and restore the ecosystem. For too long Smurfit has lingered in the background as an impending issue, the slow seepage of toxins into our water has been deemed acceptable and the potential for a flood event that poisons the river further is ignored.

For the health of all Montanans — and our environment — the EPA should be actively cleaning Smurfit-Stone to preserve the last best place.

Madalyn Gabel Missoula, Mont.

[Editor’s note: While Frenchtown, Mont. is a long way from the Sandpoint area, the Clark Fork River flows through there before emptying into Lake Pend Oreille. Rivers don’t care much for state boundaries, nor do the issues affecting them.]