Judge affirms county's fire district decision

A judge has ruled in favor of Lincoln County in a lawsuit challenging the county’s assertion that a petition to form the Cabinet View Fire District failed to gather enough signatures.

District Judge James Wheelis also noted that the county has sole authority to form a fire district, not the courts.

John Rios, the petition coordinator for the Cabinet View Fire District, filed the lawsuit in December, claiming that the county had erred when it rejected his petition.

Initially, Lincoln County determined that Rios had met the petition criteria. However, the county later received multiple written requests from people asking to remove their signatures from the petition. In November, the county informed Rios that the petition fell short of the minimum number of valid signatures.

Lincoln County Commissioner Tony Berget said the fact that the proposed fire district didn’t get along with other entities, such as the Libby Rural Fire Department, was a big reason the county got involved so heavily.

Berget also said the county had received as many as 30 requests from homeowners in the Cabinet View area to reject the effort to form a fire district.

“There was a group out in Cabinet View that said, ‘We don’t want that to happen,’” Berget said.

To create a fire district, a petition must be signed by the owners of the real property of 40 percent of the proposed district, and that property must also represent 40 percent or more of the taxable value of the district.  

The proposed fire district contained 6,496.427 acres of land, totaling $68,204,784 in taxable property. Rios initially had just more than 40 percent of the necessary signatures, but after the county determined that two of the petition signers did not own property within the district, and after three separate property owners withdrew their signatures, Rios was left with just less than 40 percent of the district.

After rejecting the petition, the county informed Rios that he should contact them within a state-mandated timeframe if he believed an error had occurred. But Rios did not respond in time; he said he was called away for a family emergency, his step-father’s death, just before the deadline to challenge the county’s decision.

Instead, Rios filed a lawsuit when he returned.

When contacted Thursday by The Western News, Rios declined to comment on the outcome of the lawsuit.

Berget said representatives of the proposed fire district have requested another meeting, but the county’s attorneys advised against it.

It’s possible, Berget said, that Rios and his group may appeal Wheelis’ decision to the Montana Supreme Court, which was the situation with the Bull Lake Fire District.  

“A lawsuit is never the answer,” Berget said. “We’d certainly like to get this behind us.”

The effort to form a new fire district in the Cabinet View area started after the county dissolved the Cabinet View Fire Service Area two years ago. At issue was Cabinet View Fire Service Area’s assertion that it had the right to self-dispatch during emergencies.