It’s long past time to set the record straight on the county commissioners’ $1 million payment to two land developers, arguably one of the most unexplainable – and as yet unexplained – decisions ever made by any local government. But we are talking about Ravalli County Commissioners here, who in the last five years have racked up quite a record of playing fast and loose with the law and taxpayer dollars. The time is ripe for taxpayers to begin asking some serious questions about this payment decision, including why and how it came to be made.
The million-dollar payment was made to two limited liability corporations: Big Sky Development Group, LLC, registered in Victor, principal agent Paul Wilson; and Morado Mountain Estates, based in Polson, principal agent, Stacey Dykeman.
Both Wilson and Dykeman proposed to develop their adjoining properties 3.3 miles east of the Eastside Highway accessed by Eight Mile Creek Road, near Florence. Wilson had proposed a 35-lot subdivision called Sandhill Ridge; Dykeman proposed a 58-lot subdivision called Morado Mountain Estates.
Although some people, including some sitting commissioners, would like you to believe the 2007-2010 commission on which we served is to blame for the million dollar payoff and the “Judgement Levy-Big S” amount appearing on your tax bills, nothing could be further from the truth. We never voted on either of the two subdivision applications. In fact, the applicants never even scheduled public hearings on either application when we served on the commission.
We did, however, deny Wilson and Dykeman’s joint request for a variance from the road improvement regulation that would have required them to improve Eight Mile Creek Road. Their two subdivisions would have resulted in 744 additional vehicle trips per day. Improvements to Eight Mile Creek Road would have cost the developers upward of $4.4 million. The developers instead offered a much less comprehensive patch-and-pave plan that would have cost $600,000 – roughly half of which would have been paid by the developers and the other half by the county taxpayers in the form of county road department labor.
Though a good idea from the developers’ point of view, the taxpayers, unsurprisingly, opposed it. We received 70 calls and emails from taxpayers urging us to deny the developers’ road improvement plan on the sensible grounds that they didn’t want to subsidize the cost of a private development.
Listening to the taxpayers, we did just that: we denied the variance request and asked the developers to submit a reworked road improvement plan.
Instead, in August 2008, they sued. In December 2010, days before we left office, the court issued its ruling. Of the original 15 counts brought forth by the developers, the court ruled on only three and found for the developers, largely on technical grounds. (Case number DV-41-2008-342 for those who would like to check for themselves.) To summarize, the variance process we inherited, and which we used to make our decision, was flawed, and our attempt to strictly apply a set of confusing criteria contained in the law was akin to fitting a square peg in a round hole. The court remanded the subdivision application and the road variance request to the county commissioners for public hearings. But by the time it landed before the commissioners for a hearing and a decision, we were out of office and there was a new board in place to make those decisions.
Both subdivision applications and the joint road variance request received their first and only public hearing, review and approval in July of 2011 – seven months after we left office.
It’s critical to note here that in the road variance ruling, the court determined that neither party – neither the developers nor the county commission – addressed the issue of damages. From the Opinion and Order: “Neither party pointed to evidence in the record on the issue of actual damages and the Court concludes that this issue was not properly before the Court.” The ruling also noted that the developers’ ability to prove actual damages might have been constrained by state law and “by the abrupt decline in the local real estate market after August 2008.”
No damages were awarded, and given the state of the economy in August 2008, and the thousands of platted but unsold and undeveloped lots in the county, it seems unlikely that neither Wilson nor Dykeman would have sold any of their lots.
The December 2010 court ruling should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. For reasons that have not been explained to the public, the commissioners, after giving the developers everything they asked for, including subdivisions and taxpayer-subsidized road repairs, went the extra mile for Big Sky Development and Morado Mountain Estates. On April 24, 2013, Commissioners Jeff Burrows, Suzy Foss, Greg Chilcott, J.R. Iman and Ron Stoltz voted unanimously to pay $300,000 to Dykeman’s Morado Mountain Estates, LLC. A year later, on May 12, 2014, four of the same five commissioners (Foss was absent) voted to award $675,000 to Wilson’s Big Sky Development Group, LLC.
Why?
The court order clearly specified that damages were not at issue before the court. The court was absolutely clear that the remedy was a rehearing of the variance request and a hearing on the subdivisions. Given that, then, what was the action that triggered the payoff?
It’s not clear what can be done now about the tax money that was paid to two land developers who got everything they asked for – and then some. But three of the county commissioners who made the decision – Chilcott, Iman and Burrows – are still in office. They have an obligation to explain to the public why they paid nearly $1 million to developers in a no-damage award lawsuit several years after the court ruled damages were not an issue. Why do they refuse to take public responsibility for their decision? Why did they try to illegally sneak the payoff by the public, as the Bitterroot Star’s successful lawsuit brought to light? And why do they hide behind the lie that a previous commission is to blame?
Carlotta Grandstaff and Jim Rokosch
Former Ravalli County Commissioners