Livingston resident Maggie McGuane poses for a photo near her home in Suce Creek, one of Paradise Valley’s northernmost drainages, on Oct. 23, 2024. Photo by Amanda Eggert
From the hillside above her home on Suce Creek, Maggie McGuane has a clear view of the property a Miami-based investment firm is eyeing for a luxury resort development.
The lower boundary of the empty three-lot parcel is easily identifiable. It’s been planted in winter wheat, highlighting the right angles that form the property’s lower edge. The upper lot has more relief, stretching up a pine-dotted hillside.
McGuane has climbed above the cottonwoods that shelter her house from Park County’s infamous wind — blowing moderately on a late October day — to explain why she finds a proposal to put 100 cabins, a restaurant and a spa in this tucked-away slice of Paradise Valley a “uniquely mysterious” prospect.
The mystery pertains to peculiarities of the 90-acre property, which is still listed for sale, and the inscrutability of the parties involved: an out-of-state landowner named Robert Pappert whom McGuane has been unable to reach outside of communications with his attorney and realtor, and Flex Capital Group, an out-of-state real estate developer that’s an unknown quantity in Montana.
McGuane has been unofficially appointed by her neighbors to lead the charge against the development, which has generated difficult conversations about zoning in the two months since the proposal came to light via an email exchange unearthed by a local nonprofit. McGuane and others argue that the development is out of alignment with the area’s predominantly rural character, and a poor fit for a community eager to avoid the breakneck development that’s reshaping nearby Bozeman, a rapidly growing college town of 57,000 that was recently crowned one of the country’s “coolest” small cities.
The Suce Creek property for sale includes three parcels that total 90 acres. Courtesy ERA Landmark Real Estate
Though McGuane is well aware of an outpouring of interest in the amenities Paradise Valley has to offer, aesthetic and otherwise, several features of Flex’s plan have challenged her understanding of the voracity of the land lust transforming Paradise Valley, the place she scattered the ashes of her mother, actress Margot Kidder, and the home she said she can’t imagine leaving.
Suce Creek is a relatively tight drainage perpendicular to Paradise Valley, a wider valley that has long been a thoroughfare for ranchers raising cattle, anglers casting for trout in the Yellowstone River, and tourists eager to spot geysers, grizzlies, wolves and bison in nearby Yellowstone National Park. Even without a zoning district precluding the type of commercial resort development Flex has in mind, McGuane finds it hard to imagine more than 100 structures and 400 parking spaces packed into a 90-acre property with so much slope. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” McGuane said, going on to describe the land as “rattlesnake-crusted, barren [and] windblown.”
“Barren” pertains to water availability, which McGuane said is “core to this battle,” especially given an active lawsuit between Pappert and neighboring landowners and the fact that several of her neighbors have had to redrill their wells in recent years in search of a reliable water supply.
Pappert, a North Carolina-based dentist, acquired a right to some of Suce Creek’s water when he purchased the property in 2014. Since it’s not a particularly senior right, scant water is available to the property owner during the dry months of the year. A three-year legal battle produced a recent water court ruling finding that Pappert is entitled to 40 miner’s inches of water (roughly 450 gallons per minute), but whether he has access to that water via an easement across his neighbor’s property remains legally unresolved.
“This is my first experience with a proposal that, across the board, everyone thinks this is a bad idea.” –
Suce Creek resident Maggie McGuane
Another access issue pertains to roads. Though the property is just a few miles from two major north-south routes — Highway 89 and its cousin to the east, East River Road — Suce Creek Road is a gravel road prone to drifting in with snow when Park County’s winter winds kick up in earnest.
Finally, there are concerns of the horned, hooved, furred and fanged variety. On a recent fall day, dozens of cattle roamed above a cattle guard posted with an “open range” sign. The Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, just a couple of miles up-drainage from Pappert’s property, supports the kinds of large mammals that need distance from people to thrive, including moose and rarer animals. In 2006, a trio of teenage hikers spent nearly two hours tucked into the fetal position to protect themselves from a charging grizzly bear.
Up on the hillside, McGuane takes a break from throwing a stuffed octopus for Penny, her copper-colored mutt, to relate the story of a black bear that frequented the drainage from 2018 to 2022. He was first seen as a small cub near her house. Her husband dubbed the bear Darren.
McGuane’s not sure what happened to the bear, but she suspects a neighbor shot him. She knows plenty of people in Park County don’t share her views about large carnivores — or any number of natural resource issues, for that matter — which is part of the reason she’s been so struck by what she describes as consensus around the Suce Creek development.
“It’s amazing to see everyone in agreement — and this is Park County-wide. I have grown up around these things being huge battles. This is my first experience with a proposal that, across the board, everyone thinks this is a bad idea,” she said. “This development has challenged all of our notions of how far things could go, how nonsensical the growth could be.”
‘THE Z WORD’
Like other residents of southwestern Montana, McGuane learned about the development from the Park County Environmental Council, a 34-year-old nonprofit perhaps best known for a successful multiyear campaign to fend off an exploratory gold-mining operation in nearby Emigrant Gulch that state environmental regulators permitted in 2017. Curious if murmurs about a new development in Suce Creek were founded, the group submitted a record request to the county planning department in early October.
The request produced about a dozen emails between Park County Planning Director Mike Inman and Nir Balboa, one of Flex’s managing partners. Balboa described the property’s location and inquired about what sort of environmental reviews would be required for a 100-cabin development sketched out in renderings for Flex projects in Utah and North Carolina that he described as “identical to” the company’s plans for Paradise Valley. The documents show small, flat-roofed cabins with lots of right angles and glass situated near 27,000 square feet of shared amenities: an airy 200-seat restaurant, a pair of indoor pools with a view into surrounding green space, an event space and a storefront for recreational gear.
Flex Capital Group envisions building cabins that are between 615 and 895 square feet. Rendering courtesy PCEC
The renderings generated an immediate stir on social media. (“Tell these derivative traders that don’t give a flying damn about this place that they are not welcome here,” software executive and local lodge owner Jeff Reed wrote on his Facebook page shortly after Park County Environmental Council shared the renderings. “Make this an election issue for our county commissioners.”)
Park County fields inquiries from developers trying to understand the regulatory lay of the land in the county “fairly frequently,” Inman told Montana Free Press in a recent interview. It doesn’t take long to give interested parties the broad outlines: There is a sign ordinance along Highway 89 as well as five smaller citizen-initiated zoning districts scattered throughout the county, but there is no county-wide zoning. Local review requirements for most commercial projects — including those like Flex’s — are therefore extremely limited, he said. Substantive project reviews would instead go through state agencies such as the Montana Department of Natural Resource and Conservation, which would examine the water-availability piece of the equation, and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, which would review project components pertaining to wastewater management and public waterworks.
“Nobody wants things in their backyard, which we hear a lot, but there are no guardrails,” he said. Inman and the appointed, volunteer-staffed county planning board he works with spent several years developing a proposal for an agricultural and residential preservation zoning district (previously dubbed a “conflict mitigation zoning district”) that would have allowed local elected officials to weigh in on proposals like Flex’s, as well as other commercial enterprises such as tire dumps, asphalt plants, wind farms, chicken processing facilities and shooting ranges.
County commissioners voted to put that proposal on ice in 2022, partly due to the logistical challenges of taking public comment during the COVID-19 pandemic. It generated intense interest: 226 pages of comments regarding the zoning proposal landed in county employee inboxes. In an interesting twist, anti-zoning and pro-zoning contingents banded together to halt it. One side argued that it went too far, and the other said it didn’t go far enough.
“Fear runs both sides,” Inman said of the two camps’ unusual cooperation. “When you are operating out of fear, it is really difficult to have consensus and productive conversations.”
The community fears that county planners are grappling with now underscore why it’s better to discuss growth before conflict around a specific proposal sharpens the debate, Inman said. “I’m really amazed at how [the Suce Creek proposal] has blown up, for something that may not even get built.”
Whether Flex is casually interested in Pappert’s property or fully committed to pursuing a Paradise Valley development is a source of widespread speculation in Park County seat Livingston and beyond. Billed as an “innovation-oriented real estate investment firm with fully integrated acquisition, development and property management expertise,” Flex was founded in 2020 by real estate and hospitality executives with experience in the Miami and New York City real estate markets. The company did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment.
Property owner Pappert declined to be interviewed, but the realtor representing him told MTFP on Dec. 3 that Pappert is still accepting offers for the property, which has been listed intermittently since 2021. It’s currently listed for $3.9 million. In 2014, the year Pappert bought it, it was listed for $800,000.
If approved and built as proposed, a new resort in Paradise Valley will incorporate 100 cabins on a 90-acre parcel. Rendering courtesy PCEC
Park County Environmental Council Co-Director Max Hjortsberg said the Suce Creek proposal strikes him as a “very Big Sky-esque” development slated for an area that has retained its agricultural foundation and “quiet social fabric.” “This is indicative of a new type of development,” he said. “[We’re] being sought after by a different level of developer and investor.”
Since the nonprofit received its record request, Hjortsberg said, it’s learned that Flex has approached at least two other Park County property owners with purchase offers. (They were declined.) “They’re doing their due diligence, so we think they’re very serious and definitely making a play at this development opportunity,” Hjortsberg said.
Erica Lighthiser, Hjortsberg’s co-director, said she doesn’t particularly relish the marathon time commitment involved with zoning questions — “the ‘Z’ word,” she calls it — but she’s grateful that the Suce Creek prospect has reignited conversations about community planning.
“We need something, because otherwise it’s this slow erosion of this ecosystem and this area where there’s a little development here, a little development there. And all of a sudden, we’re like everywhere else.”
NEXT STEPS
To Lighthiser’s relief, conversations about the Suce Creek development aren’t confined to social media — they’ve spilled over into the City-County Complex, the nexus of local government for the 18,000 people who live in Park County.
Lighthiser said she’s encouraged that county residents voted in June to deny Referendum One, which would have repealed the county’s existing growth plan and effectively kneecapped a county-wide zoning initiative. To the chagrin of planning proponents, a sister initiative, Referendum Two, did pass. As a result, any new county growth policies — or amendments to the existing one passed in 2017 — won’t be implemented unless they garner the approval of voters living outside of Livingston and Clyde Park, Park County’s only incorporated communities.
On Nov. 20, the commission held a workshop on growth before a standing-room-only crowd in the City-County Complex’s Community Room. Though the workshop wasn’t explicitly about the Suce Creek proposal — the county attorney advised against discussing developments that may eventually come before the commission — the project came up frequently in public remarks during the hour-long meeting.
First up to the microphone was Suce Creek resident Richard Walker, who said Flex’s project would jeopardize his water and, by extension, his property value. He said five of the “dozen or so” families living in the drainage have had to drill deeper wells in the decade since he moved into the area, and he’s heard of similar issues in more southerly drainages. “If this property goes in at Suce Creek, the water usage is going to render our properties worthless,” he told commissioners. “We won’t have water.”
Flex Capital Group’s plans for a Paradise Valley resort include a 200-seat restaurant. Rendering courtesy PCEC
A couple of attendees advised commissioners to consider their legacies, and to act proactively and swiftly to initiate county-wide zoning. Kevin Johnson, who described himself as living “within eyeshot of the Suce Creek project,” implored the commission to preserve Livingston and Park County’s “old-school charm.” Still others cautioned that without guardrails, the area is destined for the growth-related issues that have afflicted other communities like Bozeman and Big Sky.
Leslie Fiegel with the Livingston Chamber of Commerce and It’s My Land, a landowner rights organization, offered a different view. Park County residents have had lots of opportunities to participate in planning discussions, she said, and the outcome “has played out the way that it should.”
“This is not a time for political division. This is not a time for blaming others or companies that want to start a new business,” she told commissioners. “Thank you for what you’ve done up to this point. … We have your back.”
Park County’s three commissioners stayed quiet through most of the meeting. Toward the end, though, they opened a window into their views about where one person’s property rights end and another person’s start — the tension at the heart of so many land-use debates, both locally and West-wide.
“We need something, because otherwise it’s this slow erosion of this ecosystem and this area where there’s a little development here, a little development there. And all of a sudden, we’re like everywhere else.” – Park County Environmental Council co-director Erica Lighthiser
Mike Story, who is midway through his term, described the Suce Creek development and the discussions it’s engendered as “an ongoing thing” and encouraged Park County residents to keep reaching out for conversations. He said he’d like to see similarly packed meetings in Park County’s less populous areas — places like Clyde Park, Emigrant and Gardiner — “just [to] have ideas out there that we can look at.”
Commission Chair Clint Tinsley, whose term is up at the end of this year, said there are options the commission can pursue now, but they’ll require a lot of hard conversations — a nod to how “beat up” commissioners have gotten in meetings about previous zoning proposals.
“If the majority of this community wants zoning, that’s probably where we need to go,” said Tinsley, who formerly led Livingston’s public works department. His seat will be assumed by Jennifer Vermillion, a Shields Valley hay and pig farmer, in January.
Brian Wells, an Emigrant business owner appointed to fill a commission vacancy in 2023 and recently elected to serve a four-year term, said in his careful drawl that he would like the planning department to evaluate growth-wrangling options that other counties with similar populations and political leanings have pursued.
“We’re a pretty diverse and divided community,” he said, “but one thing we have in common [is] most everybody I talked to would like to see some kind of guardrails, some kind of protection.”
MONTANA MICROCOSM
For nearly two months, McGuane has made it her mission to learn the public and private tools Suce Creek residents can use to protect their drainage. They’ve mulled over county-wide zoning and citizen-initiated zoning, purchasing the property outright or encouraging a land trust to make an offer.
No solution is perfect, McGuane says, so they’ve also hired an attorney to represent their interests if the sale goes through and Flex forwards their proposal to state regulators. (DEQ spokesperson Rebecca Harbage told MTFP on Dec. 3 that DEQ hasn’t fielded any proposals or outreach from Flex.)
In the meantime, McGuane said she and her neighbors are “in a weird state of limbo.” But that status hasn’t been without benefits, she said.
“This is the most perfect tiny example of the conflict all over the state. So much of it is just the conflict between people from remarkably varying backgrounds with big financial losses and gains on the line,” she said. “If we can do a good job working through this, I would love for this to be a good example for the rest of the state.”
About Amanda Eggert
Amanda Eggert studied print journalism at the University of Montana. After four years working with the Forest Service as a wildland firefighter, she worked for Outside magazine as an editorial fellow before joining Outlaw Partners’ staff to lead coverage for Explore Big Sky newspaper and contribute writing and editing to Explore Yellowstone and Mountain Outlaw magazines. Prior to joining Montana Free Press’ staff in 2021 Amanda was a freelance writer, researcher and interviewer.
