A smell in Lake County

Lake County officials should do themselves and the taxpayers they are supposed to represent a favor: Call a special meeting of the county’s planning commission and rescind their Sept. 4 approval of the conditional use permit and preliminary plat for the Silver Rapids redevelopment project.
As the exhibits in the twin lawsuits filed by Community Advocates for Responsible Development, or CARD, and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources strongly suggest, county planning officials were fully aware that the permits that the commission approved last month were in violation of both county ordinances and state law.
As we reported last week, one of the exhibits included in the legal filings was a spreadsheet apparently produced by Lake County planning staff, which clearly spells out the maximum number of residential units that would be allowed as part of the project, based on either the Lake County ordinance or the state’s less restrictive shoreland rules. In both cases, the number of units approved by the planning commission exceeded the numbers calculated by the county staff. In the case of the county ordinance — which is the standard that applies according to the DNR — the planning commission allowed more than twice the number of units that were allowed.
We tried to confirm whether county planning staff ever made that spreadsheet available to the planning commission, but given the ongoing litigation, county officials are keeping mum on that and any other questions. It’s almost certainly going to be a key question in the ongoing litigation since it gets to the matter of whether this was a mistake by the planning commission or a willful decision to violate the law.
County taxpayers should be interested in that question since it may determine whether the county’s insurance carrier will pay for the cost of the resulting litigation. Insurance carriers typically refuse to pay such costs when lawsuits are the result of willful violations of the law.
If, as it seems, the planning commission approved permits and a preliminary plat knowing that they were doing so in violation of the law, county residents should not only be shocked, they should demand the resignation of anyone involved in that decision. That includes county planning staff who appear, based on the documents submitted to the court, to have failed in their obligation to defend the county’s ordinance. That failure is so egregious that it raises troubling questions.
We’d like to believe that planning staff are sincere individuals who are committed to abiding by the county’s ordinance and protecting the environment in general. Yet their actions in this case appear inexplicable, unless they faced political pressure from higher-ups, like members of the county board, to look the other way as the commission approved permits that clearly violated the law. To that end, the Timberjay has submitted a data request to Lake County to review emails or texts from several county officials involved in this decision to see whether pressure was applied to grease the skids for the developers in this case. Ten days after we made that request, Lake County has yet to even acknowledge receipt.
We should note that the developers are not the ones to blame here. They represent investors looking to make money — for better or worse that’s the American way. It’s no surprise that they are going to advocate for the maximum number of units they think they can get approved. It’s not unusual for a developer to ask for more than they think will be allowed, with the expectation that the responsible government unit will hold them to standards set forth in the ordinance.
In this case, however, it appears we have an irresponsible government unit that was far more interested in accommodating developers than it was in protecting the interests of other property owners in the area or the environment.
This should be a wake-up call for residents of Lake County, who should now recognize that the people who are supposed to be minding the store appear to be out to lunch, or worse.
As regular observers of the decisions of local governments in our region, we have seen many instances where questionable decisions are made out of haste, ignorance, or lack of due diligence. The nature of this decision raises the prospect of something more troubling, possibly corruption. We certainly hope that’s not the case, but if the documents and arguments submitted by CARD and the DNR are true, the planning commission’s Sept. 4 approvals of the preliminary plat and CUP at Silver Rapids are simply inexplicable.
And it’s been apparent from the beginning that Lake County officials did their darndest to keep the public both uninformed and ignored. When you add it all up, there’s a smell here that we typically don’t encounter in our region. Let’s hope there’s an innocent explanation.