City, county, butt heads on three mile limit

“This is bad business.”
That was Custer County Commissioner Craig Hindle’s response to a county resolution proposed by commissioner Mark Hartman that, if passed, would prohibit directing discretionary funds to municipalities that maintain extraterritorial jurisdiction within Custer County.
“This puts a stake right in the heart of everything we’ve worked for the last three years,” Hindle said, referring to the city and county’s ongoing negotiations to decrease the city’s platting jurisdiction from the current three miles outside city limits, the maximum allowed by state law. There has been talk of lowering the jursidction to one mile, albeit not in a uniform way in each direction.
City of Custer Mayor Bob Brown, who was in attendance at the meeting, took things a step further when he said the ordinance was tantamount to blackmail.
“To say you’re not going to assist with West Dam, to me, that’s blackmail. That’s where I see it,” Brown said.
Brown said he interpreted that withholding discretionary funding meant the county was “withdrawing (its) million dollars for West Dam” that apparently had been discussed between the two entities unless the city gives up its platting jurisdiction in the county.
“Is that what it was saying in there?” Brown asked.
Hindle said he doesn’t believe the commission ever said it was going to earmark $1 million to repair West Dam, while adding the ordinance does say the county could withhold the discretionary funding.
Hartman said a number of people in the county have approached him about doing away with the city’s platting jurisdiction three miles outside of the city limits, saying he believes it is of no benefit while calling it “an unnecessary layer of government.” He said he believes the county’s Ordinance No. 2, which deals with subdivision and use of land, protects county landowners without the added regulation.
“A lot of people in the three mile feel like they are being held hostage by the city, and it’s not just Custer City. It’s Hermosa, it’s all the cities. It’s an extra layer that wastes everyone’s time,” Hartman said.
Brown said a look at the City of Custer’s minutes would show the city has been working on the three mile issue, with the city and county planning commissions working together to come up with a solution. Brown said he had been working with Hartman and Hindle on a solution as well, but was told by Hartman recently that Hartman didn’t plan to come to the meetings anymore and that the city and county “will never work together.”
“No, I said if we are going to work together, we have to both work together,” Hartman said.
“No, you told me were not going to work together,” Brown said.
City planning administrator Tim Hartmann was also at the meeting and said a map has been proposed, created jointly by the city and county planning commissions, that proposed the city’s jurisdiction go to different distances—up to three miles—depending on which direction from the town one went. Hartmann said he didn’t know where the proposal landed with the county. Brown said the city was amenable to working to reduce the jurisdiction down to a mile, at least in some areas.
Hartman said the reduction had been discussed for three and a half years and has gone nowhere.
“It’s not happening,” he said.
“That’s not with me though,” Brown said, as he has been mayor for less than a year. “My staff is trying to work with your staff.”
The proposed resolution also proposes the County Planning Office charge a fee for its services to municipalities that maintain the extraterritorial jurisdiction to make up for the time the county’s planning office spends reviewing the plats. However, it was pointed out the plats are sent to the county as a courtesy and is not something that is required for plats in the three mile area.
Commissioner Travis Bies asked county planning director Terri Kester what kind of costs her office incurs from the sharing of plats. Kester said the county and city planning offices work well together, adding she sends plats to the city, and vice versa, for review by both offices.
“If there is something wrong with a road or anything comes up the (county) planning office makes the comment to the city office and the city office takes it to their council,” she said. Kester said “nine out of 10 times” the city council follows the county’s recommendation.
Kester said there usually aren’t many corrections on the plats, and it’s typically just a question of road specifications, which Hartmann usually traverses for inspection.
“Previous directors didn’t work with the city and it didn’t go very well,” Kester said. “I feel we work very well together. We communicate. If there are any issues we work through them and try to fix them.”
Hartman said Little Italy Road, just west of Custer, is a good example of a road where the city waived both its and the county’s standards for roads, resulting in a road that doesn’t meet specifications in some parts and has cost the county thousands of dollars to fix over the years.
“Sins of the past,” Hindle said. “(We) try not to let it happen again.”
Brown said those sins go both ways, pointing to the East Custer Sewer District (Granite Heights, Harbach Park, Triple T area) and the Homestead Subdivision as county projects that went bad and the city eventually had to annex or take on. In both cases, density combined with septic tanks and wells too close together led to contaminated wells. The city had to eventually bring Homestead onto city utilities as well as do street upgrades in the subdivision, while the sewer district had to be formed and was allowed by the city to dump its sewer lines into the city’s line for treatment.
“The city screwed up, the county screwed up, (let’s) move on,” he said.
Bies said he has always been of the belief that smaller towns shouldn’t be allowed a full three miles, and that it should be down to a mile if the city wasn’t intending to annex areas for which it had platting jurisdiction. Commission chairman Jim Lintz said he proposed legislation to that effect in his time in the state legislature, but it never made it out of committee.
“I think this resolution is a little premature if Custer is willing to pursue this and work on it,” he said. “I think we are better off doing that.”
Hartman eventually motioned to table the resolution until the next meeting to allow for public comment on the three mile area. Because Brown will be out of town during the next commission meeting, it will instead be discussed at the commission’s March 30 meeting.