(Spirit Lake)– The Dickinson County Board of Supervisors today (Tues.) heard from an attorney representing two business owners in Drainage District 50 on the north side of Milford who petitioned the board, serving as drainage district trustees, to repair and improve a tile that is no longer functioning. The supervisors last year voted to scrap the work after learning it wasn’t going to be feasible financially due to the tile being built over and surrounded by infrastructure. Ann Quail, an attorney representing those who petitioned for the work, requested the board reconsider their decision to scrap the project, saying some storage units in that area are repeatedly getting flooded…
“Bottom line is either the court’s going to force you, as far as I can see, or, I mean, if you end up in litigation it’s going to be non-productive for everybody. Or you can just say, okay. Let’s go back to the drawing board and see what we can do, get some other opinions, get some other ideas, and maybe it’s just that one branch, just that one tile, what can we do about one tile? We don’t have to look at everything that goes on there, and see if there’s another engineering opinion.”
Supervisor Tim Fairchild defended the board’s action to scrap the project…
“Correct me if I’m wrong but drainage districts have tremendous latitude and authority to upsize or improve a drainage tile. And in this case we didn’t have access to the right-of-way, so everything we did hinged on that because we had to leverage. For instance when we tried to re-route it, suddenly we came into utilities. Normally utilities have to move because we have the easement. Well, in this case, we have to move utilities. We have to deal with the city of Milford because we’re trying to acquire this easement and that really was the stumbling block for every single problem we had was the fact that we had to abandon our right-of-way.”
The supervisors today (Tues.) took no action as to whether or not they plan to re-visit the matter.
