Helena Urban Standards Boundary Workshop: Engage, Facilitate, & Plan

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Helena is the capital city of Montana and county seat of Lewis and Clark County. Double-digit percentage population growth during each of the last four decades, much of it in unincorporated areas, has created the need for greater, more effective, planning. The pattern of unmanaged growth, the cumulative impacts of thousands of individual decisions, started showing its impact on the public purse and natural resources of the city and county. The joint city and county request for CPAT assistance centered on a 2009 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two entities which was adopted in order to better manage growth in the city, the urban standards boundary, and the Helena Valley. The city and county implemented some tasks outlined in the MOU while several other important tasks remained incomplete. A key component of the team's role included facilitating a workshop of stakeholders to learn what those individuals viewed as the issues, goals, and tools that can be used to achieve more cost-effective and pro-active forms of development within the USB.

The report details the team's recommended actions for consideration by the city and county. Some of the recommendations build upon the feedback received at the stakeholder workshop and others are based on the team's professional expertise and experience in working with local governments on growth management.

Meet the Team

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Team Leader

Joanne Garnett, FAICP

Joanne Garnett has over 30 years of professional planning experience in the public and private sectors. Among her many specialties is assisting local governments with their short-term and targeted planning needs. She is a past national president of both the American Institute of Certified Planners and the American Planning Association. Garnett routinely participates as a speaker at national, regional and state planning conferences and also provides planning commissioner training seminars. She is actively involved in her community as a board member of the Downtown Sheridan (Wyoming) Association, a Main Street-affiliated organization, and previously served on the Wyoming Humanities Council.

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Team Member

Bill Collins, AICP

Bill Collins served as planning and development director in the Southeast, Northern New England and the Rocky Mountain West, including more than a decade in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. As a planning consultant during the past decade, he has assisted dozens of public and private sector clients in Montana, Idaho, Arizona, and Wyoming. His career in planning and development spans over 30 years. His professional experiences have touched upon nearly every facet of the planning profession, including affordable housing, environmental protection, growth management, economic development, community character preservation, and transportation strategies. Preparing, administering, and defending regulations and comprehensive plans, as well as working with private land owners, have been the major elements of his work.

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Team Member

Ken Markert, AICP

A professional planner since 1984, Ken Markert is a rural and small town planning specialist with a wide-range of local government planning experience from across the U.S. Markert formed MMI Planning in 2003. He has extensive experience working on master plans for a number of towns, cities, and counties in Wyoming and Montana. He has produced county land use plans, town master plans, city neighborhood plans, city comprehensive plans, as well as zoning and subdivision regulations for clients in the region. Previously, Markert was the Park County planning coordinator. He directed the completion of the county's land use plan and prepared a new county zoning resolution, which included the county's first complete zoning map.

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Team Member

Neal Starkebaum, AICP

Neal Starkebaum is the Assistant Director of the Gunnison County, Colorado Community Development Department. He graduated from Colorado State University with a Bachelor of Science in Natural Resource Management and has more than 25 years of professional planning experience working on a wide-variety of land use in both urban and rural and resort community environments. He has extensive experience working on issues involving state and federal land management agencies, oil and gas development, protection of the Gunnison Sage-grouse, development review and community floodplain management.

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