(Spirit Lake)– A request to rezone some property for the new Lakes Life Skills location at 1601 Keokuk Avenue drew a lot of discussion at Tuesday’s Spirit Lake City Council meeting. The city’s Planning and Zoning Commission had recommended approval of the change, from C1 to Highway Commercial. Linda Schofield of Lakes Life Skills told the council they plan to start offering mental health treatment services out of that location, which is currently not allowed as a use under the current zoning classification…
“But what we want to do in partnership with Plains Area Mental Health, with Sioux Rivers Region and with Shade Of The Tree Counseling is to partner to offer some options to people rather than, we hear of terrible suicides in the area and the surrounding areas, that someone 24 hours a day can walk in and talk to somebody right now and have some help. And you probably know just as well as I do, we have suicides in farming professionals, young people in our community, drug rates in our community, the rate of self harm in our community, and we have no options here.”
Dickinson County Supervisor Kim Wermersen also serves as chairman of the board of the Sioux Rivers Mental Health Region. He told the council having such a facility in the region would be huge…
“Emmet county is joining our region in July and so between Emmet, Dickinson, O’Brien and Sioux counties for sure, this would be a very accessible facility where we could help folks that have the need for a lot of different things for mental health. We are doing the best we can to work with the facility and work with Linda to try and bring her up to speed so that we can provide those services locally. We will certainly support her and do the best that we can to make it a very viable, great region that I think will be a benefit not just to the region but for Dickinson county and Spirit Lake.”
Council members agreed there’s a vital need to have those services available locally.
Following some further discussion, they referred a proposal to the Planning and Zoning Commission to add treatment services as a permitted use in the C1 district. City Attorney-Administrator Gregg Owens said doing that would eliminate the need for a change in classification. Councilman Jerry Harbst said he was concerned changing the zoning classification for that property could be perceived as “spot zoning”.
