Council continues to grapple with growth
By Jerry W. Kram
The Parshall City Council continued it quest cope with all the changes that have come about with the Bakken oil boom.
One of the problems the city has had to cope with is working through all the large, complicated development plans sometimes involving hundreds of acres and as many as 1,000 units. These plans need extensive engineering review, which is provided by the city’s engineering company AE2S. However, ironing out the changes in the plans at the monthly city council meetings was becoming overly time consuming for the council and involved months of delays for the developers.
The council decided to investigate creating a city planning and zoning commission that would be able to work with developers on a more flexible schedule than the monthly council meetings. However, Mayor Richard Bolkan said it looks like it will be impossible to find the five people that would be needed to create a planning and zoning commission.
“I just don’t know if we will be able to find enough people,” Bolkan said. “We need five people and I haven’t been able to come up with more than two or three.”
