Commission approves first reading of 4 ordinances
A months-long effort by the Lincoln County Clerk and Recorder’s Office to revamp the handling of resolutions and ordinances — a task Commissioner Mark Peck described as “the horse-barn cleaning of government work” — came one step closer to completion Wednesday when the County Commission approved the first reading of four ordinances.
The second reading of the ordinances will potentially happen during the commission’s May 9 meeting, after which commissioners Peck, Jerry Bennett and Mike Cole will vote whether to adopt them.
Wednesday’s action came four weeks after the commission adopted a resolution prescribing a uniform policy and procedure for drafting and adopting resolutions and ordinances.
The four new ordinances are 2018-01, which re-codifies county ordinances and prescribes how they are formatted; 2018-02, which deals with litter control and enforcement within the county; 2018-03, which covers dog control and enforcement; and 2018-04, which establishes rules of conduct and terms of enforcement for parks and other recreational lands under county ownership or administration.
Clerk and Recorder Robin Benson said copies of the ordinances would be posted for review on bulletin boards in the Lincoln County Courthouse in Libby and in the North Lincoln County Annex building in Eureka, as well on the county website.
In a phone interview Thursday, Benson explained that the effort was in response to the county’s decades-outdated register of ordinances and repeated queries from department heads and residents concerning exactly what ordinances were on the books.
The lack of an up-to-date register also put the county out of compliance with state code, she said.
When Benson brought this up with Bernie Cassidy, the previous County Attorney, he said she would have to go through all the previous County Commission minutes to determine what ordinances previously had been approved and amended in order to bring the register up to date.
This considerable task was made possible thanks to software called Laserfiche, Benson said, which allowed deputy clerks Chris Nelson and Maranda Davis to search for the word “ordinance” in meeting minutes from the late 1800s to the present day and to compile a binder that was shared first with department heads and then with the County Attorney’s Office for review.
Ordinance 2018-01 is a new ordinance, Benson said, and the four ordinances altogether — which she stressed still haven’t been adopted — are the only four the county has for now.
Deputy County Attorney Josh Nemeth, who has been assisting Benson, explained to the commissioners on Wednesday that ordinances 2018-02, 2018-03 and 2018-04 “were on the books already” and had been updated to reflect new formatting requirements and to remove redundancies with State of Montana code.
“These ordinances particularly cover things that the county is authorized by the code to enforce criminally,” he explained, adding that they also were ordinances that State of Montana code requires “to be passed by this special procedure (including two readings and codification) that we’re doing today, and to be codified in accordance with the first ordinance, 2018-01.”
Nemeth said that the formatting and other revisions to the county’s processes would make it easier for the County Attorney’s and Sheriff’s offices to prosecute and enforce, respectively.
Benson said that, as required by state statute, all ordinances will be reviewed and voted on for re-adoption every five years.