Clagstone Country Estates · Journal

The setbacks are the smallest thing in your way

Joe Kroetch — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It is one of the first questions people ask, usually standing on the ground with their arms out, guessing at a line. How close to the edge can I build?

The county has an answer and it is shorter than you expect. In the Rural zone, where all fifty-eight of these homesites sit, Kootenai County asks for twenty-five feet from the front line, ten feet from each side line, and fifteen feet from the back. A second street on a corner wants fifteen. That is the whole of it, and it is the same rule that applies to rural parcels across the county.

The plat does not invent its own version. Its restrictions note simply points at the county: all setbacks to be in accordance with Kootenai County code requirements for the Rural zone. So the numbers above are the county’s own, out of section 8.2.207 of its Land Use and Development Code.

Now put them on a six-acre homesite and watch them almost disappear.

Take a lot three hundred feet across and nine hundred deep, which is close to the shape of most of these. Pull in twenty-five feet at the road, fifteen at the back, ten along each side. You have gone from about 6.2 acres to about 5.5. You kept nine tenths of your ground, and the strip you gave up is mostly the bit nearest the road you were never going to put a house on anyway.

That is the part worth understanding before anyone starts worrying about lines. The county setbacks are real, they are enforced, and on a parcel this size they are the least of the things standing between you and where the house goes.

Where the front line actually is

One detail matters more than it sounds like it should. The code measures a road setback from the edge of the right of way rather than from the pavement, and out here those are a long way apart.

The roads through this plat sit in sixty-foot rights of way. The pavement is twenty-eight feet of that, so there is sixteen feet of shoulder and ditch on each side of the asphalt before you reach your own property line. Your twenty-five feet starts at that line, not at the edge of the blacktop. In practice that puts the front of your house about forty feet back from the edge of the asphalt, and fifty-five from its centre line, without you doing anything clever.

We measured this across all fifty-eight lots rather than taking it on faith: the road-facing property line sits thirty feet off the centreline on lot after lot, which is exactly half of a sixty-foot right of way.

The setbacks that actually bind

Here is the one that matters, and it is not the county’s.

The plat carries two special setbacks of its own, and they are not small. One requires three hundred and seventy-five feet from a north property line. The other requires four hundred and seventy feet from an east property line. Both apply to all primary and accessory buildings, not just the house.

On a lot nine hundred feet deep, a three hundred and seventy-five foot setback takes better than a third of your depth before you start. That is not a detail a builder wants to meet late.

Which homesites, we are not yet saying
The plat’s note names the affected lots by lot and block number, and those numbers do not resolve against the block and lot labels on the drawing itself. The note refers to lots 19 through 25 of block 2, and to lots 33 through 35 of block 3, and neither range exists in the numbering the same drawing uses.
They do both exist in the one-to-fifty-eight homesite numbering this site uses, which is the tempting reading and may well be the right one. But the note says block, and a reading that requires ignoring the word block is a guess.
So the setbacks are stated here as real, because they are, and no homesite is named. The question is with Olson Engineering. If you are looking at a particular lot and this matters to you, ask us and we will tell you what we know and what we do not.

What really decides it

Once you have the lines, the things that shape where a house sits on six acres are almost all bigger than twenty-five feet.

Fire comes first. The defensible space the fire districts ask for runs to a hundred feet of managed vegetation around the building, which is four times the deepest setback the county asks for. That is thinning rather than clearing, and we wrote the whole of it up in defensible space is not a clear-cut. If anything is going to move your house, it is that.

Then the driveway. Every foot between the road and the house is a foot you build, plough and maintain, and on parcels this deep that number gets real quickly.

Then water and waste. The well and the drainfield each need their own room, and a septic system here is your own, on your own acreage, permitted through Panhandle Health District rather than by the county planner. How septic works here covers that side.

And then the ground itself. These parcels fall between five and nineteen feet across their length, which is gentle, but a house wants the flat part and the view usually wants the other end.

You can try it

The homesite sketchpad on every lot page now knows the county’s figures. Drop a house on the parcel, drag it where you like, and it will tell you how far you are from the nearest property line and whether that clears what the code asks for. When it does not, it says by how much.

It draws no buildable envelope, deliberately. We tried, and on parcels whose boundaries are surveyed curves the shape it produced was wrong enough to be misleading, so it reports the number instead of shading a picture we would not stand behind.

This is a sketchpad, not a plot plan
Nothing here is a permit or a site plan, and none of it is advice. The county figures above are section 8.2.207 of the Land Use and Development Code, and we went back through the county’s own amendment record to check them: the same four numbers appear in the printings of February 2018, October 2019 and September 2021, and 8.2.207 is not listed in any amending ordinance through September 2021. The predecessor ordinance carried the same figures back to 2007. They are stable, which is a reason to trust them rather than a reason to stop asking. Your builder and Kootenai County Community Development are the ones who decide.

Defensible space is not a clear-cut

Joe Kroetch — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Say the words defensible space to somebody who just bought six acres of timber and watch what happens. They picture a ring of stumps. The house sitting out in the open in the middle of its own bare circle, and the reason they wanted the trees in the first place hauled off on a truck.

That is not what the term means. The clearest description of it I have come across lately came from a fire district describing its own building.

Northern Lakes Fire Protection District went before the Kootenai County Hearing Examiner in August, applying for a satellite station of its own. In that hearing, case CUP26-0007, the district said it would build to “Firewise landscaping standards (5-ft and 30-ft defensible zones)” and would maintain “100-ft of natural vegetation” around the station.

Read the second half of that again, because it is the half everybody drops. A hundred feet of natural vegetation, maintained. Not removed. The trees are still standing at a hundred feet, and at fifty, and at thirty-five.

Inside about thirty feet the ground is kept clear and lean. From thirty out to a hundred, the timber stays and gets thinned.

Those are two different jobs. The inner one is housekeeping close to the walls: nothing stacked against the siding, the needles off the roof and out of the gutters, the ground cover low and green rather than dry and woody, and no ladder of small trees leading up into the crowns of the big ones. Idaho Firewise puts numbers on the two things people get wrong most often out here, and both are the same number. Firewood at least thirty feet from the building, and the propane tank at least thirty feet away as well. A stack of rounds against the south wall is the most common way a careful person undoes the rest of it. The outer one is forestry. You take out the crowded stems so the crowns are not touching, leave the healthy ones room, and clean up what is lying on the ground. When it is done well it looks like woods somebody works in, which is what it is, rather than woods somebody mowed.

Idaho Firewise, the non-profit that coordinates wildfire education in this state, divides the same ground into three and the names tell you the whole story. Clean and green nearest the house. Pruned and groomed beyond it. Native vegetation furthest out, which is the one worth reading twice, because what it asks for there is spacing rather than removal: ten by twelve or twelve by twelve feet between trees and woody shrubs. Its trifold puts distances on them too, and they are the ones you will see everywhere once you start looking: zone one is the house and the first five feet, zone two runs five to thirty, zone three thirty to a hundred and beyond. Those are NFPA’s figures, which Idaho Firewise reproduces and Northern Lakes committed to by name. So the numbers in this piece are not three sources agreeing by coincidence. They are one framework, quoted by a fire district, a state non-profit and a county code in turn.

One thing in that trifold is going to read strangely on ground like this, and it is better said than skirted. Its list of what to avoid near the house begins with plants that carry volatile oils and resins, and it names pine, spruce and juniper. In zone two it says, plainly, avoid conifers. We are selling six-acre lots in ponderosa and mixed conifer. The advice is not wrong and it is not aimed at the timber on your back forty: it is about what you plant against the siding, in the first thirty feet, where a resinous shrub is a wick. The forest stays. The foundation planting is where you get to choose.

The county puts a number on it. Describing what a wildfire mitigation plan has to cover, the code asks for plans to eliminate dangerous fuel conditions in and around building sites, and says canopy cover in those areas “should be less than fifty percent”. Less than half is a thinning, not a clearing. It wants lower branches pruned, the ground kept reasonably free of debris, and ladder fuels and dead and dying trees taken out, and then it says something I did not expect to find in a code: “Snags that do not present a fire hazard should, however, be left standing to provide habitat for birds and wildlife”. A dead tree that is not a danger is worth more standing than felled, and somebody wrote that down.

Now the part that matters more than either zone, and the reason I wanted to write this down rather than put it on a brochure. There are two separate moments here and they get mixed up constantly.

The first one is ours, and it happens before anybody owns a lot. Kootenai County’s land use code says a subdivision has to meet the requirements of the fire protection district with jurisdiction, and it names defensible space in that list, alongside roads, driveways, fire flows, hydrants and water storage. Then it asks for more on ground like this. A major subdivision in a timbered area has to have a wildfire mitigation plan written by a professional forester, approved by the county and by the fire district, and that plan “must be implemented as part of the required improvements for the subdivision”. At the end of it the forester signs again, certifying that what the plan said would happen did.

The second moment is yours, and it comes later. The fire district that serves this ground is Timberlake Fire Protection District, and when Timberlake was asked about a subdivision case in 2025, case CUP25-0004, the minutes record its division chief and fire marshal, Kody Wright, responding in a letter dated April 25 of that year that conditions and requirements would be applied at the time of building permit application. That is the district looking at your house, on your lot, when you are ready to build it.

So it is not that nothing is required. It is that the first requirement lands on us and the second on you, and neither of them lands on the day you buy.

Where these quotes come from
The code is the Kootenai County Land Use and Development Code, Ordinance 493 as amended 22 October 2019: fire protection systems under article 8.6.7, and what a wildfire mitigation plan must contain at section 8.6.901. That requirement is not new; the same words are in the subdivision ordinance it replaced.
The two quotations from hearings are the Hearing Examiner minutes of 20 August 2026 for CUP26-0007, and the Community Development minutes of 24 July 2025 for CUP25-0004. County minutes are draft until they are approved at a later meeting, so treat them as what was said at the hearing rather than as a final official record. Kody Wright’s answer reaches us through those minutes rather than from the letter itself, which is why it is reported here rather than quoted.

If you would rather see the shape than read about it, the homesite sketchpad on any lot page draws both zones now. Put a building down and the trees inside thirty feet come out from under it; the band from thirty to a hundred thins, with the rest of the parcel left alone.

That, drawn rather than photographed: a house and a shop on parcel 21, the ground cleared close in and the timber thinned beyond it. There is no house at Clagstone to photograph, so this is our own renderer working from the approved plat. The ground under it is USGS orthoimagery.

What to actually plant

The distances get all the attention and the plant list is the part you will use. Idaho Firewise picks for four properties: high moisture content, soap or latex or pectin in the sap, a low compact growth form, and drought tolerance so it stays green without you watering it all summer. Everything below is hardy to zone 5 or colder, which is what you need up here.

Groundcovers and low perennials for the first few feet: hardy ice plant (Delosperma hybrids), lipstick strawberry (Fragaria hybrid), Firewitch dianthus (Dianthus gratianopolitanus), Angelina stonecrop (Sedum rupestre), hens and chicks (Sempervivum spp.), evening primrose (Oenothera macrocarpa) and giant soapwort (Saponaria x lempergii).

Natives and drought perennials further out: sulphur buckwheat (Eriogonum umbellatum), Venus penstemon (Penstemon venustus), firecracker penstemon (Penstemon eatonii), blue flax (Linum lewisii) and yellow wild indigo (Baptisia spp.), which fixes its own nitrogen.

Subshrubs and shrubs where you want some height: Powis Castle silver sage (Artemisia hybrid), Pawnee Buttes sand cherry (Prunus besseyi), Autumn Amber sumac (Rhus trilobata), mock orange (Philadelphus hybrids), John Cabot rose (Rosa hybrid) and Spitfire quince (Chaenomeles speciosa).

See the plants, with each photographer credited, on the original entry. The pictures are other people's work and stay there.

Mock orange is worth a second look. It is a relative of syringa, Philadelphus lewisii, which is Idaho’s state flower, so the thing that belongs here anyway is also on the list.

The species and their selection are Idaho Firewise’s, from the trifold linked below. The demonstration garden those pictures come from is in Boise, which is a different climate from this one, so treat the list as a starting point and ask a nursery in Sandpoint or Coeur d’Alene what actually takes up here.

Which is the thing worth noticing when you look at it on a six-acre homesite. The circle is smaller than the picture in your head.

Worth reading before you cut anything
Idaho Firewise keeps a library of this material, most of it free and none of it ours. Two are worth the time before a chainsaw comes out.
Landscape Design and Plants for Fire Resistance Idaho Firewise · PDF, 2 pages, 18.3 MB
Written for this state, with the plant lists that matter more than any distance. Large file: it is a print-resolution trifold.
Reducing Wildfire Risks in the Home Ignition Zone via Idaho Firewise · PDF, 7 pages, 507 KB
The zones set out properly, at more length than a journal entry should try, and it is candid that its crown spacing comes from a standard rather than from your particular slope.
Neither is a rule, and neither is written about this ground in particular. They are the thinking behind what the fire districts ask for.

Four things at once, and one I would put differently

Joe Kroetch — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Watch “Name another one” on YouTube

“Find another piece of ground in North Idaho that checks all these boxes. I’ll wait.” Read on for the box I would not tick.

Natural gas, community water, three-phase power. Finding all three on one piece of ground in this corridor is genuinely hard, and I will still take the challenge on those.

Three-phase is the one people underrate until they need it. It is what makes a real shop possible: welders, a dust collector that actually pulls, a lathe worth keeping. Most rural acreage gets single-phase and you find that out after you have bought it.

Two I left out on camera. Twenty acres of dedicated open space that nobody ever builds on. And the homesites sized for Idaho’s timber exemption, which needs five stocked acres excluding your homesite, and is the reason five-acre lots do not work.

The fourth one needs a better sentence

What I say on camera is “right next door, a national forest, thousands of acres of public land accessible from your property.” That is the kind of line a short rewards and a written page should not, and it is stronger than I can back.

What is true: the country opens up north and east of here, and about fourteen miles up Bunco Road the trail system reaches into the Idaho Panhandle National Forests. The road in passes Stimson timberland first. Kootenai County grooms sixty miles of winter track out there.

What is not true is a back fence that opens onto federal ground. You will hear that said about a lot of places in North Idaho. It rarely holds, and it does not hold here. The Land lays out the actual chain, and I would rather you read that than take the version that fits in forty-one seconds.

A hundred years of looking after it

Joe Kroetch — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Watch “We are not out-of-state developers” on YouTube

“You don’t just use land. You look after it, and you pass it forward.”

My great-grandfather started buying timberland in Harrison, Idaho over a hundred years ago. We are a timber company before we are anything else, and that shapes the clock we work on. Some of the ground we own will not be developed for another hundred years, because that is a perfectly ordinary planning horizon for timber and an absurd one for almost any other business.

It is also the honest answer to a fair question, which is who is doing this and what happens when they leave. Plenty of land in this corridor is being subdivided right now by people who found a parcel on a map from somewhere else. That is not a moral failing, but it does change what gets decided when a decision costs money and nobody who made it will be here to live with it.

This is home. The standard we are building to is the one we would want to live next to, which is a lower bar to state than to hold and the only one worth stating.

Where it actually stands: roads are going in now, plat recording is targeted for late 2026, and first closings are expected early 2027. Nothing is on the market. Our story has the longer version, four generations of it.

Riding season

Joe Kroetch — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This one is not about the development.

Watch “Riding season beats screen time” on YouTube

The quad, the yard, and the wash rack afterwards. No pitch in this one.

Took a break and let the girls run their quad around the yard. Then they put in the other half of the deal at the wash rack, which is the half nobody volunteers for and the half that makes the first half keep happening.

I am leaving it here rather than only on the channel because it is the actual argument for this kind of ground, and it is one I am not able to make in a list of utilities. Six acres is a number on a plat. What it buys is somewhere a kid can ride a hundred and ten cc’s worth of quad in circles until they are bored of it, without loading it onto a trailer first and without asking a neighbor’s permission.

Why the homesites are six acres and not five

Joe Kroetch — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Watch “The property tax program most Idaho buyers do not know about” on YouTube

“Every buyer’s situation is different, and I’d always recommend talking to your accountant.” The exemption is real; it is not automatic.

People ask why the homesites are six acres when five would have fit more of them on the same ground. This is the answer, and it is not a marketing reason.

Idaho’s Forestland Taxation Law lets qualifying forest land be assessed on timber productivity rather than full market value. Kootenai County administers it as the Timber Exemption. The requirement is at least five fully stocked acres devoted to growing and harvesting timber, and that five acres excludes your homesite and improvements.

Work that through on a five-acre parcel. Take out the house, the shop, the driveway and the septic field, and there is not five acres of standing timber left. The parcel cannot qualify no matter how it is managed.

Six acres is what it takes for the exemption to be available to somebody who wants it.

We sized the land so the option exists. Whether it is worth taking is a conversation for you, the Assessor and your own tax advisor.

Before you count on it
It is not automatic, and it is not ours to grant. It takes a forest management plan and an application to the Kootenai County Assessor. The deadline is December 31. Changing the use of the ground later can trigger recapture of the deferred tax.

The question we did not start with

Joe Kroetch — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Watch “Build Your Life” on YouTube

“Every decision we made here was about quality of life, not yield per acre.”

Most subdivisions start with one question, which is how many lots can we fit. It is not a dishonest question. It is just the one that decides everything after it, and once it is answered the rest of the decisions make themselves. Lot sizes come down. Roads get narrower. The shared ground becomes whatever is left over after the sellable pieces are drawn.

We started somewhere else, and the ground shows it. Parcels sized for actual privacy, with room for a shop and room for animals. Twenty acres set aside as common open space, not as leftover. Infrastructure put in so the land is livable rather than only ownable.

That last distinction is the one I would defend hardest. Plenty of acreage in this corridor is ownable. You can buy five acres tomorrow. Then you drill, and you haul, and you run a generator, and you negotiate with a road board every February about a plow. The land was never the hard part out here. Everything attached to it was.

Documenting the whole build, including the parts that go wrong

Joe Kroetch — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Watch “Documenting the entire 400-acre build in North Idaho” on YouTube

“I’m going to be documenting the whole process. The good, the hard, all of it.” Filmed at the entrance on day one.

The reason to film the build rather than only the finished thing is that the finished thing tells you almost nothing. Every subdivision looks good once the lawns are in. What you cannot tell from a photograph of a finished neighborhood is whether the water was done properly, whether the road base was cut to spec, or whether somebody found a way to save money in a place a buyer will never look.

So the plan is to show it as it goes: the graded corridor before the pavement, the trench while it is open, the parts that take longer than they should. If something goes sideways it goes in the series too. A build with no hard parts is a build somebody is editing.

What is going in underneath: paved public roads, a community water system, Avista natural gas, underground utilities, twenty acres of shared open space, and fifty-five of the fifty-eight homesites at six acres or more.

Nothing here is for sale yet. Plat recording is targeted for late 2026 and first closings are expected early 2027.

Fifty-eight homesites, and what is already in the ground

Joe Kroetch — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This was the first thing we put out about Clagstone, filmed standing on the ground it is about.

Watch “New North Idaho large acre subdivision coming soon” on YouTube

“This is for families that want land. Real land, with the utilities and access that make it actually livable.”

The part worth repeating in writing is the list, because it is the part that is hard to find out here and easy to say without meaning it.

Paved public roads, plowed by Lakes Highway District rather than by a road association you join at closing. A community water system drawn from properly drilled wells instead of fifty-eight separate holes into the same aquifer. Avista natural gas. Underground power, so there is no line of poles across the view for the next hundred years.

Twenty acres in the middle stay open ground and never get built on. Fifty-five of the fifty-eight homesites are six acres or more, and there is a specific reason for six rather than five that is worth its own post.

None of that is finished. The roads are going in now, the plat recording is targeted for late 2026, and nothing is on the market yet. The Land has the numbers as they actually stand, including the three homesites that come in under six acres and why.

A town that turned down an easier name

Joe Kroetch — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2020 a news crew drove up from Boise to ask the question everyone gets around to eventually, which is how a town of seven hundred people came to be called Athol. The segment is below. It runs two and a half minutes, and the anchor does not make it through with a straight face. He is in good company.

Watch “How did the northern Idaho city of Athol get its name?” on YouTube

KTVB, 2020. If you would rather watch it there, open it on KTVB's channel.

I have heard every version of the joke, so the segment held no surprises for me. What interests me is the part it leaves out. This town was once offered an easier name, and it said no.

Where the name came from

The version you hear at the counter in town is that a Scottish duke passed through and the place took his name. The city’s own history page tells it more carefully. The settlement was first called Colton. A settler who had come from Athol, Massachusetts renamed it for his hometown, and that town had taken its name from a district in Scotland tied to the Duke of Atholl. So there is a duke in the story, three steps back and four thousand miles off, and the city says plainly that nobody knows whether the name came west with a descendant of that family or simply in somebody’s memory. I like them for saying so.

It is a pity, because the real duke would have been worth the trip. The title was created in 1703 and belongs to the head of Clan Murray, and its holder keeps the Atholl Highlanders, the only legal private army in Europe, a privilege Queen Victoria granted after a visit in 1844. There is no evidence that a man with a private army ever stood in this valley. It is easy to see why people wish one had.

The neighbors

Once you start looking, Athol is the plain name around here.

How to say it
Athol
ATH-ul · the duke's title is said the same way
Coeur d'Alene
kor-duh-LANE · heart of an awl
Schitsu'umsh
s-CHEET-sue-umsh · those who were found here
Pend Oreille
POND-oh-RAY · hangs from the ear
Ql̓ispé
kuh-lee-SPEH · the camas people
Kootenai
KOOT-nee · the county, and not koo-ten-AY
Rathdrum
RATH-drum · the prairie south of the plat
Kroetch
crutch · the family, and the property group

Coeur d’Alene, twenty-six minutes south of us, is French for “heart of an awl,” the spike a saddler uses to punch leather. French-speaking fur traders hung the name on the Schitsu’umsh people, and the usual explanation is that it was a grudging tribute to how hard they bargained. The old fur company ledgers render it as “Pointed Hearts.” The Schitsu’umsh call themselves something closer to “those who were found here,” which is the better name, and not the one on the map.

Go north instead and you reach Lake Pend Oreille, French for “hangs from the ear.”

Traders called the Kalispel that for the shell ornaments they wore. The Kalispel call themselves Ql̓ispé, the camas people, after the blue-flowered bulb they lived on. The largest lake in Idaho is named after someone’s earrings.

Then there is the state. Around 1860 a lobbyist named George Willing carried the word Idaho into Congress as the name for a new territory near Pike’s Peak, and told the committee it was Shoshone for “gem of the mountains.” Congress liked it, and was close to a vote when word got around that it was not a Shoshone word, and possibly not a word at all, and that Willing had made it up. That territory became Colorado. The word should have died there, but people had already started saying it. It went onto a steamboat, then a mining town, then a county, and when gold came out of the Clearwater the workings were called the Idaho diggings. By 1863 there was an Idaho Territory, whatever anyone thought of the name. Historians have since gone looking for a Nez Perce, Shoshoni or Arapaho word it might have come from, and come back with nothing.

Even the hoax is not settled. Willing’s claim first appears in print in 1875, fifteen years after the word does, and the steamboat launched in 1860, so no one can say whether he coined it or claimed it afterward. The state is named for a word that was probably invented, by a man who may or may not have invented it.

The name they kept

At one point the town considered calling itself Silver City, after the theme park down the highway. It would have ended the jokes, and it went nowhere. People had grown used to the name and to the ribbing that came with it, and they kept both. The man the news crew interviewed said the jokes roll off him, and that most of the town is the same way. After a while, an easier name starts to look like the thing you would have to explain.

The businesses in town, the ones still open and the ones we have checked ourselves, are on the town page.

Approved, no exceptions taken

Joe Kroetch — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The approved set came back from Lakes Highway District dated February 3rd, signed by the district’s director of highways, with four words checked at the top of the stamp: approved, no exceptions taken. Olson Engineering drew it. The district found nothing to send back.

If you have not sat through a plan review, those four words may not land. Districts almost always take exceptions; that is what review is for. A note here, a revision there, resubmit and wait.

No exceptions means the drawings held up exactly as submitted, roads and drainage and water and all of it, on the first pass.

Our engineers earned that, and I want it on the record that they did.

Since people always ask for numbers, here they are, straight off Sheet C-4.

Off Sheet C-4

Fifty-eight homesites, totaling 356.172 acres

The largest is homesite 18, at 7.152 acres

Nine come in a hair under six, most of them by hundredths of an acre

That last one is exactly why we have always said six acres, give or take, instead of promising a minimum the survey pins would have to argue with.

The streets got their names, too. Bridlewood Avenue, Mustang Street, Paddock Avenue, and Wandering Moose Road, which picks up the old private Wandering Moose Trail where the neighborhood meets it. All public, all dedicated, all plowed by the district, with three sixty-foot rights-of-way reserved at the edges so the county grid can grow someday without touching anybody’s lot line.

And the water. Community wells on their own tract serve every homesite, through 5,478 feet of six-inch main, buried five feet down, with five fire hydrants on the line and a one-inch service stubbed to every lot. All of it chlorinated, tested for bacteria, and pressure-tested to Idaho public works standards before a single home connects. It draws from the Rathdrum Prairie aquifer, the same water the cities down the highway drink. Your septic system is still your own, on your own six acres, the way it should be. The longer story is on the water page.

I want to be precise about what this is and is not. This is the construction-plan approval, the engineering, and we will say exactly that every time. What it means today is simple enough: when the machines cut, they cut to an approved drawing. If you want to see what got approved, the land page carries every figure from Sheet C-4 and tells the rest. Or come out and walk it, which was always the better way anyhow.

Five years, and a unanimous yes

Joe Kroetch — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The Board of County Commissioners approved Clagstone Country Estates on the fourteenth of August. All three of them, in favor. Bruce Mattare chairing, Leslie Duncan and Marc Eberlein alongside him. The Order of Decision came back signed a couple of weeks after that, and I have spent the time since reading it rather than celebrating it.

I want to put the timeline down first, because it is the part nobody sees.

How long this took

Pre-application conference with county staff, October 16th, 2020

A complete application accepted, May 3rd, 2024

Public hearing before the Hearing Examiner, July 17th, 2025

Approved by the Board, August 14th, 2025

Four years and ten months from the first conversation to the vote. Some of that was ours, working out what this ground should become. A good deal of it was the ordinary pace of doing it properly.

What the county approved

Fifty-eight homesites on roughly three hundred and ninety-nine acres, in the Rural zone, designated Country on the county’s Future Land Use Map. Alongside the homesites: two open space tracts, one of twenty acres and one small one near the entrance, a tract for the utilities, and a tract at the road for the school bus stop and the mailboxes.

The Rural zone sets a five acre minimum. Most of these are over six, which was a deliberate choice and one I will write about on its own sometime.

The part I am proudest of

The approval includes pedestrian and equestrian pathways. Not only along the road rights-of-way, but running between the homesites, and the Homeowners Association maintains them under the covenants. That is now a condition of the approval rather than a promise in a brochure, which means it does not depend on anyone’s goodwill later, including mine.

The Hearing Examiner’s own analysis is the thing I keep going back to. Out of everything in the file, the examiner picked out two features as reflecting “an awareness and sensitivity to the natural environment”: the open space, and the pedestrian and equestrian trails that encompass the property. Those two, together, are what the county found justified the density of the plan.

The trails are not an amenity we added on top. They are part of why the county said yes.

The twenty acre open space tract was a voluntary dedication. Nobody required it of us. I would rather give up a couple of homesites than build a place where the only ground you can walk is your own.

What the file says about the ground

The county’s findings describe the property as relatively flat, with approximately twenty-four feet of elevation change across the whole of it and every slope under fifteen percent. That figure is ours, out of the narrative we submitted with the application. Kootenai County’s own 2019 LiDAR, which reads bare ground rather than treetops at roughly twenty thousand points inside each homesite, puts the total fall at twenty-nine feet, from about 2,485 feet to 2,514 feet. Two sources that had no reason to agree, five feet apart. For four hundred acres in North Idaho that is unusually level ground, and it is the reason the roads and the utilities lay out as cleanly as they do.

The timber is a mixed stand, mostly Ponderosa and Lodgepole Pine. There are no streams and no seasonal drainages, and no wetlands under the National Wetlands Inventory. The property does not sit in a special flood hazard area. The soils are predominantly Kootenai-Bonner complex with smaller areas of Bonner ashy silt loam, and the county found them suitable for residential development.

None of that is exciting to read. All of it is the sort of thing you want established in writing before you buy land.

Who else signed off

Timberlake Fire Protection District approved the request. Kootenai County EMS approved it. The Lakeland School District’s response, in full, was that the district is “neutral on this issue and has no concerns.” The interior roads will be built to Associated Highway District Standards and dedicated to the public in the name of Lakes Highway District, so they are plowed and maintained by the district rather than by an association that might run short of money in fifteen years.

A condition I did not expect to like

Idaho Fish and Game asked for language on the plat or in the covenants discouraging the planting of yew. It turns out the four yew species people commonly buy for landscaping are toxic to deer, elk, horses, dogs, cats and to us, and Fish and Game has been losing big game to it. The same conditions ask for bear-proof garbage storage and some plain guidance about not feeding wildlife.

It is a small thing to write into a set of covenants. It is also the kind of condition that only exists because somebody at the state looked at a forested subdivision and thought about what would still be living here in thirty years.

Water, and what the county decided about it

The commissioners spent most of their deliberation on water, and their reasoning is worth repeating because it went further than I expected. They concluded that a community system built to the state’s public water system standards is the more environmentally sound approach, rather than fifty-eight separate wells, because a single regulated system means groundwater conditions in the area can actually be monitored. That is the option we have been pursuing and it is the option we want.

The county wrote a contingency around it. The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality has twelve months from this approval to review and approve the system, and if that window closes without a formal approval, we retain the ability to develop with individual wells on each homesite. I would rather be straight about that than have somebody find it in the file later. A community system is the plan and it is what the county prefers; the fallback exists so that the project is not held hostage to a review queue.

There is one more condition on this worth knowing, and I think it is a sensible one. We are not permitted to simply post a bond against the system’s wells and sort them out later. The wells have to be physically drilled, with the driller’s report showing what they actually produce, before the county will approve a final plat. No promises on paper where water is concerned.

What this is, precisely

This is preliminary plat approval, with nineteen conditions attached to it. It is not a recorded plat, and I am not going to describe it as one. Every one of those conditions has to be satisfied, and the final plat is its own separate application after that. Preliminary approval runs twenty-four months from the signing of the Order, with one automatic two year extension once the first phase records.

So there is a good deal of work between here and a deed with your name on it. But the questions that could have stopped this, whether the ground is suitable, whether the density belongs here, whether the agencies with jurisdiction could live with it, have been asked in public and answered on the record. That was the part I could not promise anybody until now.