County approves Roseburg request for property adjustment
Martin Kidston
(Missoula Current) A shuttered particleboard plant in Missoula on Thursday saw its request for a boundary-line relocation approved by Missoula County – a move the owners say will facilitate the distribution of individual parcels within the company.
Commissioners said the request, submitted by Roseburg, required an up or down vote. Some had pressed the county to condition the request on future beneficial uses of the property, but that's not permitted by law, the county said.
“You cannot add conditions on your approval or denial,” deputy county attorney John Hart told commissioners. “It's a straight up or straight down decision.”
With approval, Roseburg plans to reconfigure the boundary lines of nine individual parcels that comprise the larger property. Some parcels are large at more than 100 acres while some are just a few acres in size.
County planner Jenny Dixon said the boundary adjustment will result in the same number of lots but of equal size.
“Each of the tracts proposed here is greater than 20 acres,” she said. “Because there are nine tracts, we have to by policy bring this to you (commissioners). You're going to see some more of these requests in the future. We're entertaining another one.”
Roseburg was a longtime staple of Missoula's wood and timber history before it announced its plans to close earlier this year. Since then, speculation has risen regarding the property's future, though the owners have not revealed their future plans.
Representing the firm, Jamie Erbacher of the WGM Group said the requested boundary-line relocation marked an effort by the owners to address taxation and the future distribution of individual parcels within the company.
“All of the existing parcels are developable in their existing configuration. This rearrangement of property boundaries will facilitate the distribution of the land to the current holding entities within the Roseburg corporation,” she said.
The city nearly a decade ago adopted a master plan and urban renewal district for the North Reserve/Scott Street district. The Roseburg plant sits in the middle of it and a new wave of housing development has unfolded to the east.
Roseburg has not indicated its plans for the property, but said the nine parcels will include the “mill proper.” Some parcels need to be held in a separate entity for tax purposes, Erbacher said.
“In order to work through the jigsaw puzzle that we need to do here to create a single parcel for the mill property, we need to shift each of the affected parcels. This is a much cleaner and more straightforward process,” she said.