By Bill LaCroix, Victor
Before the July 11 commissioners’ meeting when they approved Flatiron Subdivision, more than 200 citizens submitted the following public comment to express their concerns:
“We the undersigned approve of the Ravalli Co. Planning Board’s denial of Flatiron Subdivision and urge the commissioners to accept the Planning Board’s advice, given with full legal and ethical consideration and in the spirit of Good Government, and also deny Flatiron Subdivision.”
You people who signed onto that statement need to know that you were not only arrogantly and unanimously ignored by the commissioners, but that you were misrepresented in public. They put your numbers at only 100. No apologies or adequate explanation for why you citizens were disrespectfully treated have yet been offered.
Flatiron Subdivision is the largest subdivision ever proposed in Ravalli County, larger than the town of Corvallis at build-out. If it goes forward it will:
· Be built in an area of notoriously high groundwater.
· Be built upstream from the city of Hamilton’s aquifer, where inevitable leaching of sewage from this huge development’s drainfield will end up.
· Disrupt longstanding agricultural activities in the area.
· Make a lot of money at the county’s expense for the commissioners’ political benefactors, including Harold Mildenberger.
In the process of approving this monstrosity, the commissioners consistently claimed they either lacked expertise of applicable physical realities and so would have to just trust the developers’ hired guns, or that they were absolutely legally incapable of doing otherwise. Notwithstanding that both positions are laughable coming from these people sitting in positions to actually act on both those things, the glaring take-home message was that your commissioners did not stick up for you, the citizens and taxpayers, at all. In fact they acted like they were working for the developer. Indeed, at one point the developers’ own well-paid representative blithely stated that he “wouldn’t want one of these in my backyard either.” To cap the poor behavior of these officials, Commissioner Kanenwisher, in full display as a young man who apparently didn’t pay attention in high school government class, lectured concerned citizens opposed to this project who showed up for these hours’-long meetings on what he viewed as their bad behavior http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDNqwb7Dw88.
One thing they did not claim was that they would listen to you, their constituents, who have overwhelmingly opposed this money-making scheme for their developer-benefactors, nor did they claim that they would try to address your concerns in any way, and indeed they did not.
The commissioners’ office should be getting several hundred phone calls from all of you who might not appreciate how blithely your concerns have been ignored.
It’s not over yet. Be outraged. Get on that phone. 375-6500 or email them: commissioners@rc.mt.gov.