The Joseph City Council is looking for a few good men and women to serve on a Committee for Citizen Involvement in order that they will revise the city’s 28-year-old Comprehensive Plan and examine important land use issues.

“We are choosing to do this because there’s a lot of change in our community – pressure for growth, pressure for development,” said Joseph Mayor Peggy Kite-Martin.

Currently, three members of the council and one citizen have been serving on a Land Use Planning Committee looking at updating the city’s comprehensive plan. Those four are Kite-Martin and councilors Pamela Latta, Richard Burch, and Mark Lacey, who was elected to the council in the November election.

Kite-Martin hopes to form a larger Committee for Citizen Involvement that would involve a wider cross-section of the city in city planning.

“We have been delayed a little bit because we haven’t had a lot of applications,” outgoing Councilor Richard Burch said.

Kite-Martin appointed a subcommittee composed of outgoing councilor Shelly Curtiss and residents Mildred O’Callaghan, and Max Volmer, in order to seek out the city’s best and brightest and create a citizen involvement committee. She hopes to have the committee in place within the next two to three months and to work toward educating the public on the importance of land use planning in relation to the future of the City of Joseph.

The council members hope that the city can receive a grant from the state Land Conservation and Development Commission so they can hire a land use consultant to assist with the update of the comprehensive plan.

Kite-Martin said that the comprehensive plan is a crucial document that will guide the city into the future and help to provide a vision of what the city will become. It also will help provide the legal basis for a myriad of land use issues that are certain to arise, she said.

One potentially thorny issue for the council is whether, by updating the city’s comprehensive plan, that would mean more people would qualify for future Measure 37 claims, Burch said. Whether or not by updating the plan will create new M37 claims is a question that attorneys will have to evaluate, Burch said.

Under Ballot Measure 37, enacted in 2004, any land use regulation that restricts the rights of property owners to develop their property that has been enacted after a landowner purchases land, qualifies the landowner for compensation or a waiver of the offending regulation.

Kite-Martin pointed to a study by Lewis-Clark State College professor Alan Marshall on the historical significance of Wallowa Lake and the “Marr Ranch” property to the Nez Perce Tribe as an example of an important document to consider when thinking about the land use issues that the citizen committee should keep in mind.

Geoffrey Whiting, an attorney for the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee, submitted Marshall’s study to the city last July. K&B Limited Family Partnership cited Whiting’s letter and the study as primary documents leading to the lawsuit in Wallowa County Circuit Court brought against three Indian tribes.

K&B has filed a M37 claim to the effect that such beliefs and statements issued from tribal figures about the historical nature of the Marr Ranch property at the north end of Wallowa Lake have prevented development projects from going forward.

For more information on the Committee for Citizen Involvement, contact Joseph City Hall at 432-3832.