(Spirit Lake)–Landowners in a drainage district on the north end of Milford will be stuck paying for some $165,000 in expenses, even though an improvement project wound up being scrapped. The Board of Supervisors, acting as drainage district trustees, voted Tuesday to approve a reclassification for branch 33 of drainage district 50, which will determine how the outstanding expenses will be divided up in assessments. The expenses were incurred when some exploratory work was done, prior to the supervisors pulling the plug on the project after learning the cost was going to soar well beyond original estimates due to buildings that were constructed over drainage infrastructure. Supervisor Tim Fairchild expressed his frustration over the situation…
“This situation is a bad situation now and absolutely guaranteed it will probably come back because there’s no resolution in any of this. Unless some action is taken going forward. The next set of trustees may go a different direction. This really needs to be solved. All we’re really determining here really today is really not, we don’t think it’s in our perview, the drainage district, to solve it. But whatever drainage law allowed this particular petition to bring this to a head, is still on the books and it will be. So a repeat performance is probably guaranteed at some point if that drainage is not resolved. So you’ve got 165,000 reasons to really push to get that solved by the people that can solve it.”
Supervisor Steve Clark added his feelings, saying its crucial the necessary steps be taken to avoid something like this from happening again…
“Because we have a lot of drainage districts that are now being incorporated into urban and commercial areas and if we can come up with a good way to make sure that when they buy that property they know that it’s in a drainage district and that they’re, you know, they have to go by, you know, the drainage regulations and laws and can expect something like this and make their plans accordingly so it doesn’t happen in the future.”
The supervisors indicated their hands are tied by state drainage law when it comes to issuing the assessments.
