Park County

Park County is a world-class place to live. From the Shields Valley to Livingston and down to Gardiner and Cooke City, Park County contains assets that most of the rest of the country doesn’t: stunning scenery, astounding wildlife, mountains and rivers, thriving ranches, and livable communities. It truly is one of the best places on earth, and we’re incredibly fortunate to be here.

We know that if we are to preserve these assets, we need to be responsible stewards of the land. Part of that responsibility is to manage growth in a way that protects property rights while ensuring that development doesn’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

In order to do so, we need to plan for the growth coming our way. We believe that:

• Most growth should happen in towns, where we can build far more homes per acre than can be done in rural areas, where our taxpayer dollars are used more efficiently. It’s much more expensive to provide infrastructure and services when homes are spread out as they are in rural areas), and less ranchland and habitat are affected.

• When growth does happen in rural areas, it should be designed in a way that reduces impacts on natural resources. Clustering homes in subdivisions, rather than spreading them out, is the best way to do this.

• Some uses are just not appropriate in some environmentally sensitive areas and development should be directed away from these areas.

That means we need to institute common-sense land use regulations that many other counties in Montana have used.