Acknowledging that the process was flawed from the start, the Flathead County Commission has terminated its attempt to create a new special-fee district to pay for the Flathead Emergency Communications Center.
The Dec. 30 decision came after a considerable amount of protest to a new district, which would have been countywide and charged residential households a $25 annual flat fee and put businesses on a $50 to $1,000 sliding scale.
The district would have brought in about $1.9 million in annual, long-term funding for the 911 Center, which is currently funded through county mills and contributions from Whitefish, Kalispell, and Columbia Falls.
In the fall, the commission voted to move forward with creating the district, starting a 60-day protest period for taxpayers, which ended at 5 p.m. on Dec. 29. Of the 65,985 notices sent out to taxpayers, 10,390 responded, and 9,527 of those responses were in opposition to the district.
The opposing responses represented $374,535 of the sought $1.9 million, or roughly 19 percent. Since that amount is higher than 10 percent, it triggered a stopgap in the process, forcing the commission to either put the issue on a future ballot or stop attempting to form a district through a commission vote.
On Dec. 30, the commission voted 2-1 to terminate the entire process, with Commissioners Gary Krueger and Pam Holmquist in favor and Commissioner Phil Mitchell voting in opposition.
During the hearing, Holmquist said once the process of creating the district started, it became obvious that it was flawed.
“For me, it became pretty obvious early on in the process that this was not as fair and equitable as we had hoped, especially on the commercial side,” Holmquist said. “It needed a lot of work.”
In previous hearings on the matter, business owners protested the potential district because the sliding scale of fees didn’t seem to be based on size, but instead seemed random.
The district was supported by the county, first responders, and the municipalities.
“At this point I would hope that we would slow down and work with the cities,” Holmquist said.
Despite voting against terminating the process, Mitchell said he also felt the process was difficult, and said he would like to see how other counties in Montana are handling this so Flathead has some comparison.
“We didn’t do a very good job of selling this to you,” Mitchell said of the plan.
Krueger said the district was an attempt to fairly fund the center, but the opposing letters and businesses raised good points about how the county and cities should go about it.
“I will be the first one to say when we were looking at certain aspects on this, I just missed the ball,” Krueger said. “We didn’t take into proper account the diff in sizes in businesses.”
While he made the motion to terminate the district for now, Krueger said he is wary of kicking this particular can too far down the road, because the costs will only increase as time goes by.
The commission voted to terminate the process, as well as officially accept the results from the mailing showing 19 percent opposition.
When the 911 Center was voted into existence and built in 2009, the levied funds were used for construction. Initially, a future-funding committee was supposed to devise a method of long-term funding for the center, which survives now on county mills and contributions from each city’s budget.
The E-911 District was on the November ballot in 2014. The measure failed by 10 votes.