After six months of intense scrutiny from a county-sanctioned, third-party investigator, employees at the Flathead County Planning and Zoning Office are eager to move on.
The investigation, completed by Ike Eisentraut of the Moonlighting Detective Agency and released to the public on Jan. 27, cleared County Planning Director Jeff Harris and his office of numerous allegations, ranging from favoritism to flouting open meeting laws. In the end, Eisentraut wrote that he found “no wrong-doing” by planning staff.
The report detailed 17 allegations against the office over nearly 800 pages. Eisentraut disagreed with the office’s actions in four cases, but ultimately wrote that he believed the mistakes were made without “viciousness or malice.”
“As far as we’re concerned, it’s over,” Harris said in an interview after the investigation’s release. “I think we need to get on with business in a positive manner.”
But where Harris sees closure, others see fertile ground for more legal action against his office. According to attorney and Kalispell Mayor Tammi Fisher, the report bolsters her clients’ belief that Harris has committed costly transgressions against residents of Flathead County. Fisher has previously represented multiple clients suing his office.
“We were surprised that the net opinion from the reviewer was that this was a professional that runs our planning department,” Fisher said.
Harris said the office is now focusing entirely on its primary job. He also noted that employee morale had risen considerably because the report vindicated their job performance.
While he welcomed the investigation, Harris said it consumed a considerable amount time and energy that could have been spent elsewhere. The total cost of the investigation was “substantial” when everything is taken into account, he said.
“It was more than $10,000, I’ll tell you that,” Harris said, referring to the money allocated by the commissioners to hire the outside investigator.
Harris asserted that Eisentraut’s conclusions should be enough for the community to move past the allegations, but he expects there will be those who disagree with the report’s findings.
“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and we respect that, but it doesn’t make them right,” Harris said. “I’m hoping that this brings some sort of closure.”
For those who leveled many of the charges against the planning office, however, closure is not on the table.
Russell Crowder, chairman of the property-rights group American Dream Montana, said his organization plans on going through the report line by line and presenting its findings at a public meeting.
County Commissioner Joe Brenneman said after the investigation’s release that American Dream Montana and its “known associates” were responsible for the allegations against the planning office. He also said the report discredited the group’s accusations.
Commissioner Jim Dupont, who recommended the outside investigation, said he was confident in Eisentraut’s methods and the report, and that he hoped the results would bring a sense of conclusion to the matter. Commissioner Dale Lauman agreed, saying he hoped the investigation would reestablish the county’s credibility and transparency.
But those responses didn’t appease nor surprise Crowder, who said he had expected county officials to cover up for one another.
For Fisher, the report prompted two clients who were on the fence about suing the county to give her the OK to file the suits.
In her interpretation, the investigation solidified allegations against Harris regardless of Eisentraut’s interpretation because Harris admitted to making mistakes in the report.
“It’s my hope that (the commissioners) will look at the substance in the report and not the editorializing in the report,” Fisher said.
Eisentraut wrote that mistakes had been made in the office, but not with malice. These instances included the handling of conditional use permits for gravel pits and “batch plants” in the West Valley. Fisher served as the attorney in both of cases. She said she wasn’t concerned if there was malice behind the mistakes but with the fact that they were made at all.
“It’s easy to brush off these mistakes,” Fisher said of Eisentraut’s report. “But the problem is, those mistakes have cost my clients hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
According to Harris, these problems have already been dealt with because the gravel pit, owned by the Tutvedt family, was reissued a conditional use permit and there is a new definition in county zoning regulations for gravel extraction, which includes batch plants. Both cases should be considered closed, Harris added.
Eisentraut also documented an incident in which Harris referred to disruptive meeting attendees as “fringe thinkers” in a letter to the Lakeside Neighborhood Planning Committee. Harris acknowledged that a written reprimand has been added to his personnel file and that matter should also be considered closed.
But Fisher insisted the reprimand, along with numerous lawsuits against the planning office, should be enough to question Harris’ role in the office. She hopes the commissioners take the whole report into account when they consider whether to renew Harris’ contract with the county in June.
Fisher also took issue with the investigation itself. She pointed to Eisentraut’s background as a criminal investigator and said it was impossible for him to fully grasp land-use planning and laws in six months.
She acknowledged that she did not object to the investigation or Eisentraut’s hiring in July, but added that employment decisions are left to the commissioners.
For his part, Harris said it was incongruous for a group of people to call for an investigation and then complain that it was defunct when the results turned out differently than they might have wanted.
Another area affected by the investigation’s release is an injunction lawsuit seeking to derail the potential Lakeside neighborhood plan. An October hearing in District Court was delayed after Fisher and Flathead County Deputy Attorney Jonathan Smith agreed to hold off until the investigation was finished.
Work continued on the plan, but both attorneys said there would be a hearing before the Flathead County Planning Board could make a decision on it. Now, Fisher said her clients might wait to see if the board and the commissioners decide to approve the plan at all before continuing with the injunction.
It will take time to see what the full effect of the investigation report is, Harris said, but in the meantime, his office is returning to business as usual. He expects there will always be a group of people who remain opposed to planning regardless of what the investigation found, but the office will continue to work with the Flathead to the best of its ability.
“The community as a whole has been very supportive of what we do,” Harris said.