Star Editorial
The Board of County Commissioners has developed the habit of giving money away to developers just for the asking, it seems. The distressing part about it is that they are doing it by deliberately evading public involvement by failing to follow the laws governing public notice and public participation.
The first case involved agreeing to make about $50,000 of road improvements simply at the request of a developer. They posted the agenda item only two hours before the meeting and (just in case somebody did see it) it was listed as an on-site meeting on a road in the Eight Mile area. Instead, the meeting was held in the commissioners’ meeting room and the decision was made within a few minutes. There was no reason in the world to honor such a request. Especially considering that it was, in effect, going to overturn a lawsuit settlement agreement in which the developer had agreed to drop those very same demands.
No wonder they didn’t want any public discussion.
The second was the decision to settle the Big Sky Development lawsuit by giving the developer $675,000 and footing the bill for another road improvement project to the developer’s benefit. This decision was also made without proper public notice and subsequently no public involvement.
A little public involvement and public discussion about this giveaway would have been interesting because, once again, there was no reason for such a deal. In this case, the developer was seeking close to $10,000,000 in damages and it might seem reasonable to get out of the case by paying a fraction of the claims. But it is only reasonable if you ignore the record in the case. At least sixteen counts were made against the commissioners, most of them with associated damages. Except for the first few counts (which ironically had to do with violation of the developer’s right to due process), all the claims with associated damages had already been dismissed. The judge found them unsupported by any evidence.
So the only monetary claims left standing had to do with the original counts that had already been remedied by remanding the decision back to the commissioners who, within a few months, approved the variance request and the associated subdivision.
The question becomes, then, what damages did the developer incur due to a delay of several months in the decision to approve the subdivision? The judge who ruled on those counts stated in his decision that, due to the crash in the housing and real estate industry at the time, the developer may even have benefited from the delay. If you examine the expert testimony given by both sides in the case in their analysis of the claims you can easily arrive at a similar conclusion. This is the testimony that the judge was looking at when he made his remark.
With the only damage claims left standing being so questionable and arguably non-existent, why pay out three-quarters of a million dollars? That’s the question that we never got a chance to discuss with the commissioners.
In both these cases the county argued that the legal issues were moot because the money had already been spent. In both cases the judge found differently based on case history concerning “repeatable offenses.” To find the cases moot would open the door to holding illegal meetings anytime you want to give taxpayer money away and then claiming that it’s moot because the money is already gone and can’t be retrieved.
In the first case, the county was ordered to pay attorney fees and change their policies to meet the requirements of our open meeting laws. They did meet and review their policy. The only requirement in their policy for public notice was to place an agenda in a glass box at the end of the hallway. After much discussion they agreed that this was inadequate and made the decision to place a glass box on the outside of the building so people could see it over the weekend.
In the second case, this new policy was also determined to be inadequate. The judge ordered the county to pay attorney fees and expressed the intention that this would help discourage future offenses.
But will it?
Or will the illegal deals in the future simply come to include a small additional percentage to cover the cost of litigation in case they are caught? You have to wonder. After all, as of yet the commissioners haven’t even scheduled a meeting to examine their inadequate public notice policy to be sure things like this don’t happen again.
How do we stop them?
Right now the only remedy on the horizon appears to be in the voting booth. But there ought to be a way to hold our elected officials responsible for these kinds of illegal shenanigans while they are still in office, don’t you think? Especially when it involves giving away for no reason over a million dollars in taxpayer funds.