by Michael Howell
The longstanding dispute, now into its third year, between the Ravalli County Board of Health and Harris Himes concerning septic issues on property owned by his company, Holy Ground, and being operated as a homeless shelter by the Big Sky Christian Center, has finally landed in court. The County filed a lawsuit in District Court to enforce a Compliance Order alleging violation of the County’s wastewater treatment regulations and a petition for abatement of a public nuisance.
A representative from the County Attorney’s office told the Board of Health last Wednesday, April 8, that Ravalli County District Court Judge Howard Recht had granted their request for a preliminary injunction that allows all the RVs at the center of the dispute to remain on the property but prevents any occupation of the vehicles. It also allows agents of the county to inspect the property to assure that Himes is abiding by the injunction.
“If he doesn’t, we will circle back and file contempt charges,” said the county’s attorney.
Himes, Presiding Elder/Pastor of Holy Ground and President/Pastor of Big Sky Christian Center, took immediate action on March 31 by filing charges against Ravalli County, the Ravalli County Board of Commissioners, the Ravalli County Board of Health, and the Ravalli County Environmental Health Department. Himes claims in the lawsuit that the defendants are violating the plaintiff’s civil rights as protected by the Free Exercise Clause and Equal Protection Clauses of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, Montana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Free Exercise Clause of the Montana Constitution by “unlawful attempts to use and enforce Ravalli County Subsurface Wastewater Treatment and Disposal Regulations and to treat the Church, as a ‘Commercial RV Park’ to substantially burden Plaintiffs’ religious exercise.”
The County claims that it is just trying to get Himes to have an approved wastewater system on the property.
After a long detour through consultation with the Montana Department of Environmental Quality over the question of whether or not the RVs constituted a “campground” and violated the Montana subdivision laws, DEQ eventually determined the RVs did not meet the legal definition of a campground and did not fall under the state’s Subdivision and Platting Act. The County still insisted that the property meet the County’s wastewater treatment regulation requirements.
As Commissioner Jeff Burrows put it last year, “The only requirement he is now facing is how much lateral pipe does he have in the ground, how big are his tanks and how much capacity can his system handle. We are not really regulating the number of trailers.” Environmental Health Director John Palacio notified Himes that the county needed information about the existing treatment systems on the property to determine whether he was in compliance with county regulations or not.
Himes responded at that time with a 20-page epistle accusing the Board of Health of running roughshod over his ministry and bullying him. He said the Board’s actions “portray what I view as a determined and relentless pattern of antagonism and discrimination against our ministry, which has attempted to severely burden it and has actually – and arbitrarily – restricted our right to freedom of religious expression in helping the homeless and others in need.
“To paraphrase David when he faced Goliath: ‘You come to me with manipulated law, with deceit, with assault upon our religious freedoms, and with a suspect agenda. But I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts whom you have defied.’ (cf. 1 Samuel 17:45),” wrote Himes.
The County claims that even if the RV residents are utilizing the church building for laundry, bathroom and kitchen facilities, the use of the RVs still constitutes a “change in use” requiring a new application since the systems connected to the shelter building did not previously serve other residents of the RVs for laundry, bathroom and kitchen facilities.
Himes claims that there has been no change in use because the original use was a “religious mission to serve people experiencing homelessness and have suffered and continue to suffer irreparable harm” and that use has not changed. He claims that the County’s Compliance Order and the lawsuit they filed to force compliance “were all initiated in response to the Church’s use of its land to house homeless individuals as an expression of its religious mission — a quintessential land use determination subject to Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act protections.” He also claims that the County’s actions are a form of religious discrimination because they are knowingly declining to enforce comparable wastewater regulations against similarly situated secular property owners in the County that operate wastewater systems that are similarly uninspected, unapproved, or unpermitted.
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