Highway Districts Win Key Ruling Judge Says Kootenai County Can’T Regulate Four Districts

A local judge has sided with highway districts in a turf battle with Kootenai County over road-building regulations.

County officials have continually received complaints from contractors who argue that they must follow county rules to protect against erosion while four local highway districts do not.

June Bergquist, water quality compliance officer for the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, said she fields 200 to 300 complaints a year.

Some of those reports are critical of highway districts in the five northern Idaho counties.

“We’ve had problems in the past” with local districts complying with state regulations to protect water quality, Bergquist said. “But things are getting better. They are learning.”

In July 1999, the county passed new rules to ensure that construction projects don’t pollute area waterways.

In that ordinance, the county wanted the four highway districts in Kootenai County to agree to what’s called a “memorandum of understanding.”

“All we wanted was a memorandum of understanding saying that they would abide by the same laws as everybody else,” Kootenai County Commissioner Ron Rankin said.

The Worley, Lakes, Post Falls and East Side highway districts balked and instead filed a lawsuit in November 1999 against the county, saying it doesn’t have the authority to regulate them.

“We are already required to meet the requirements of many different federal and state agencies,” said Tom St. John, president of the Associated Highway Districts of Kootenai County.

“This (ordinance) would have served no real purpose of changing our practices, which we do believe meet the best management practice standards,” St. John said.

On Nov. 15, 1st District Judge James Judd sided with the highway districts.

Judd wrote in his opinion that counties can pass ordinances that regulate water quality. But that authority does not extend to how highway districts design, construct, repair and maintain roads.

“Nor does it give counties the authority to require inspections or permits before highway districts begin such work,” Judd wrote. “Because I find that Kootenai County Ordinance 283, as written, exceeds the county’s authority to regulate highway district operations, I find that is not applicable to highway districts.”

Attorney Susan Weeks, who represented the four highway districts, said the highway officials had no problem following best management practices to avoid erosion.

But it was feared that the county’s ordinance would be the first legal step to more regulation by the county, Weeks said.

“What if a future (county commission) redesigned it to say that you will only plow on these days, at these times and you will pay your employees such and such a salary,” Weeks said. “It was a concern of losing our statutory rights to regulate ourselves.”

Rankin denied the county had any such intentions.

“We’ve always had a good working relationship with the highway districts,” Rankin aid. “I think there were a couple soreheads who wanted to thumb their nose at the county - over nothing.”

Since the ruling, both sides agreed that the working relationship has remained positive.

The county has agreed not to appeal the case while the highway districts have agreed not to seek compensation for attorney fees.

The four highway districts are funded through license fees, state gasoline taxes and a local property tax levy, Rankin said.

They are charged with building and maintaining all roads in the county that are not state or federal.

In many cases, old logging roads become public roads. That means highway districts sometimes inherit roads that are too steep, have no ditches and poor systems to deal with storm water.

“We are seeing improvements in (highway district) practices,” she said. “We are hopeful they will continue to learn new techniques and employ them.”