With a private investigator on the job and hundreds of hours spent gathering information, the cost of investigating alleged wrongdoing at the Flathead County Planning and Zoning department is rising.
In mid-July, Flathead County commissioners Jim Dupont and Dale Lauman voted to hire Ike Eisentraut of Kalispell-based firm Moonlighting Detective Agency to investigate the department. Commissioner Joe Brenneman was absent for the vote.
The commissioners signed a contract agreeing to pay Eisentraut $75 an hour until his investigation is finished or the costs reach $5,000 – whichever comes first. The investigator will also be reimbursed for mileage and travel expenses.
Dupont and Lauman justified the added expense of hiring an outside investigator, saying it lent more credibility to the report than an internal review could. “This way people won’t be able to call the results biased,” Lauman said at the meeting.
Over the past month, a group of citizens, including the local conservative organization American Dream Montana, have pushed for County Planning and Zoning Director Jeff Harris’s resignation or dismissal. Among their many allegations, are claims that the office flouted open meeting and records laws, illegally conducted neighborhood planning efforts in Lakeside and Somers and misspent public funds.
While the costs of a private investigator are easy to tally, the expenditure of time and resources in various county departments aimed at addressing the concerns is harder to measure.
For the planning department, where employees have been busy working on building a counter case to the allegations and meeting e-mail and document requests from their opponents, it’s substantial.
“The staff time and resources that have gone into these continued accusations are significant in regard to what they are costing the county,” Harris said.
In July, Harris estimates he’s spent about 160 hours working on information requests related to the accusations. The majority of those efforts were to prepare a document requested by the commission that responds to each allegation individually and includes supporting evidence for Harris’ response.
Likewise, others in the department have devoted a large amount of time to the issue, including Assistant Planning Director BJ Greive’s estimated 80 hours of work and 100-plus hours for other planners.
Harris said, as a result, other work in the department has gone on the back burner, most notably efforts with the county’s subdivision regulation review committee, which has had its meetings canceled repeatedly.
“We’re committed to cooperating and addressing all of these concerns,” Harris said. “It is frustrating, however, when the hours you spend responding to false accusations are hours that we can’t actually work for the community.”
Other departments attending to the planning debate include the county’s finance department, the county attorney’s office and the information and technology department. County Clerk and Recorder Paula Robinson has also been conducting an internal audit at the commission’s request regarding allegations of inappropriate spending that includes pulling receipts and expense reports from the planning office over the past few years.