By Jason Stuart
Ranger-Review Staff Writer
The Dawson County Commissioners are putting out a call to all residents of Forest Park and Highland Park to come together in a public meeting to discuss how to better manage the subdivisions’ street maintenance needs.
At their meeting Tuesday morning, the commissioners determined they would be sending out a letter in the coming days to all residents of both subdivisions calling for the public forum, with the hopes of setting a meeting date for approximately two weeks after the letters are delivered.
The reason for the meeting is the commissioners are keen to develop a method for prioritizing street repairs within the two subdivisions.
First and foremost, the commissioners want to hammer home to subdivision residents that the county is not responsible for any of the streets in either subdivision. Legally, those streets are not owned by the county, but by the subdivision residents themselves.
The county’s only role where the subdivision streets are concerned is to collect and manage each subdivision’s street maintenance fund. In Forest Park, each lot owner is assessed an annual fee of $175 for street maintenance. In Highland Park, only property owners living along 1st and 2nd streets – the only two paved streets in that subdivision – are assessed the $175 fee.
Those annual fees don’t add up to a lot, either. At present, the Forest Park maintenance fund has a total of $189,089. The Highland Park maintenance fund has $80,350. In terms of paving or especially rebuilding streets, neither amount will go very far. For comparison, in the summer of 2015, it cost the City of Glendive $183,700 to have a single block of Slocum Street rebuilt.
What the county is seeking is guidance in how to best spend the limited funding available to repair streets in each subdivision. The commissioners complained on Tuesday that is something that has been lacking, leaving them up to this point to try to decide where best to spend the money based primarily on which subdivision streets residents complain the loudest.
Noting that making decisions on where to spend the maintenance fund money based off of complaints is not the most effective method, the commissioners plan to offer the residents of each subdivision two options for how to prioritize street maintenance work moving forward.
First, the commissioners will give the residents of each subdivision the option of forming an “advisory committee” whose role would be to develop a “priority list” for which order their streets should be repaired in. The other option is that if either subdivision is unable or unwilling to form a committee, the county will appoint an existing county employee to develop a capital improvement plan for the subdivision streets, paying them for their work out of the street maintenance fund.
Commissioner Gary Kartevold said he would prefer a county employee handle it, rather than leave it to a committee.
“Personally, I think we’d be better off having one person decide things than having a group of people,” Kartevold said.
Commissioner Adam Gartner took the opposite view, however, arguing that it would be better if subdivision residents had a say in where and how the street maintenance funds are spent by having their own committee to make those decisions.
“Then they would have an avenue to address all their concerns. This way they have participation and everything, so we know what it means,” Gartner said.
Gartner continued to strongly argue his belief that the residents of both subdivisions need to take greater ownership of their neighborhoods and that forming these advisory committees would be a good first start.
For example, he noted that only a portion of Highland Park residents contribute to their maintenance fund, and that nothing is provided for maintenance of the rest of the streets in the subdivision, which are all gravel except 1st and 2nd streets. Gartner said that is a discussion an advisory committee of residents could begin having if they would form one.
“They need to also do something with their gravel roads, because those are not the county’s responsibility,” Gartner said.
During the public comments session, city resident Jerry Geiger sounded a note of an agreement with Gartner, arguing that residents of both subdivisions need to take more responsibility for their maintenance, upkeep and future.
“They need to decide what they want to do with themselves. We can’t, as a county, keep making all their decisions for them,” Geiger said. “I mean, Forest Park, how long has that son-of-a-bitch been there? Fifty or 60 years? And they’re still in limbo.”
Reach Jason Stuart at rrreporter@rangerreview.com.