City ready to get back to annexation

While still engaged in a drawn-out litigation process over an annexation attempt from 2009, the city of Havre appears to be ready to move forward with new requests.

The Planning and Development Committee met Tuesday night to talk about several topics under the annexation umbrella, including five new properties requesting annexation, the lawsuit, and House Bill 575, which was signed by Gov. Brian Schweitzer last week to address annexation issues.

"We have to take this very slowly, " Council member and former Annexation Committee Chair Andrew Brekke said. "There are a lot of things to consider. "

Since the last time the city talked about annexation, before property owners filed a lawsuit last year, five new property owners have requested annexation: the Human Resources Development Council, Steve McLain, R.J. Corman, Hill County Electric and Shooting Star Gymnastics.

Of those, the HRDC property and Steve McLain's land border the Havre city limits, which makes annexation a lot simpler for the city.

The committee voted to send those two annexations to the mayor to be added to City Council's agenda.

The other three will be held off on until the committee is able to develop a standardized procedure for such cases, which takes into account lessons from the lawsuit and recent legal changes from HB 575, before their next meeting on Tuesday, May 10.

The committee briefly discussed the lawsuit, which has been brought back to Havre to be heard by Judge Boucher, the fourth judge scheduled to hear the case, on October 24.

Most of the meeting was dedicated to going over the changes to state annexation laws that were initially authored by Rep. Kris Hansen to help Havre with problems it had faced.

According to the council members who followed the bill, its final passed form could do more harm than good.

"It's as murky as the previous ordinance, " Brekke said. "A lot was shoved in there by committee. It took a bad idea and made it worse. "

The bill was written by Hansen at the request of Mayor Tim Solomon to help the city avoid its current quagmire, but ended up with big changes, like requiring county input in annexation or allowing the county to request a judicial review of the procedure. Some of those changes were included at the request of groups like the Montana Association of Counties.

"There was a lot inserted for the benefit of the county only, " Brekke said, who went to Helena to address the Senate on the bill, which quickly passed the House before anyone in Havre caught the changes.

He added, however, that it was "not as bad as it could have been, " and would be too much of an immediate problem. At least not with "contiguous" property annexations, like the two currently moving forward.