Saundra McDavid

A year ago Eagle City Councilmen Stan Bastian (now State Senator), Phil Bandy, and Steve Guerber had an opportunity to purchase Eagle Water Company. Instead of involving the citizens of Eagle in the details and ramifications involved in that purchase, the city officials chose to pursue an unchartered and seemingly covert path for the purchase by forming a Local Improvement District (LID) in order to avoid the necessity of having a public vote on the issue.

Looking at the proposed purchase price itself, it appears city officials did not engage due diligence necessary for a $7.2 million transaction. Perhaps because there would be no public vote on the transaction, an outside appraiser was not hired to determine if the purchase price was a fair price. Instead of making arrangements to pay for the purchase of Eagle Water Company through bonds paid for by the revenues of the water company, which would have required a vote of the people, Eagle city leaders chose to force the $7.2 million purchase price on the affected residents, and then to place liens on the properties of those owners who did not pay within thirty days of their assessment notice.The assessments also fundamentally were unfair, as they were not based on actual water usage, but on the size of the water pipe on the properties. Those owners who farmed their land and were not current water company customers were assessed by the city more unfairly. Their assessments were to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars on the assumption they were going to sub-divide their properties into high-density lots.

Eagle city’s actions caught the attention of the state legislature in March of this year and a Bill to prevent the seemingly outrageous overstepping of city government authority passed through the House of Representatives but failed to get out of the Senate Committee, thus it never reached the Senate Floor. Senator Bastian was not representing the people of Eagle in his District 14 in the Senate during the committee hearing on March 18, which I attended and he did not.

Luckily for those facing very large assessments in Eagle, the newly elected and appointed City Council members acted responsibly at the Council’s April 8^th meeting and repealed the LID city ordinance, apparently against the wishes of current Mayor Bandy and Councilman Guerber. After voting to rescind the ordinance, the latter stated “for the record” that the former Council on which he and Bandy served “did nothing wrong” in forming the LID on its own in order to purchase a water company and levy assessments on properties.

In the meantime, Senator Bastian, who is running for Senate re-election this year, has switched to damage control mode. In recently published statements, he has stated he actually was not in favor of the LID as written which he helped to create in 2007, and that “at the time” of the previous Council’s vote he “had stated…I prefer a vote of Eagle citizens on this issue.” Are those true statements? Not according to a review of approved City Council Minutes from October 24, 2007. Those Minutes reveal Senator Bastian was the Councilman who made the Motion to create the Eagle LID, seconded by Bandy. Is Senator Bastian’s double-talk what voters want representing Eagle and District 14 in the State Senate?

According to the water company purchase contract, Eagle had until March 31 of this year to get the financing in order. The city failed in that effort and currently no purchase contract exists, as Eagle Water Company has to date refused to allow a contract extension. Therefore, the ordinance allowing a public vote on a city revenue bond to raise monies for the purchase was not passed, as it is no longer needed. The city’s opportunity to purchase Eagle Water Company seems to be gone and it is unclear whether Eagle will have another opportunity to do so.

The questions remain: Has Eagle lost a beneficial opportunity for its citizens because Senator Bastian, Mayor Bandy and Councilman Guerber tried to circumvent the people’s right to vote, or has Eagle’s new city leaders averted a fiscal and bureaucratic disaster?

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