Stutsman, 3 other counties to operate regulatory board

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Stutsman County entered into a multi-county agreement to operate a truck regulatory board during the commission’s regular meeting Tuesday. The board will include the counties of Dickey, Barnes, LaMoure and Stutsman, and will employ an officer deputized in all four counties to inspect and weigh trucks.

“We know we can’t keep the fines to offset the cost,” said Dale Marks, commissioner and representative of Stutsman County to the multi-county board. “But the overall feeling is we have to protect the roads from overweight trucks.”

Each county will contribute $25,000 in the 2010 fiscal year for equipment purchases and another $25,000 in 2011 to cover salary and other expenses of the officer. The new position will be headquartered in Barnes County with enforcement responsibility across the four counties.

In other business the commission waived the county loan fees for the Recovery Zone Facility Bonds planned for the theater project at the Buffalo Mall and the warehouse planned by Allied Agronomy. The bonds, authorized by the federal government as part of the stimulus, include tax credits. The county has no liability or expense associated with the bond issue but must approve the projects.

The county policy required a $1,000 application fee and additional fees of 1 percent of the loan amount up to a total of $10,000 per project.

Brian Osowski, a bond adviser for IRET, the owner of the Buffalo Mall, and Allied Agronomy said the additional $9,000 in fees made the financing unattractive to the businesses.

“Taxable rates are at all-time historic lows so the reduction in interest rates due to the tax exempt status is minimal,” he said.

The county did not waive the $1,000 application fee.

The county also released about $4 million in bonding ability to the North Dakota Industrial Commission. The bonding authority would expire at the end of the year and no local projects were far enough along to have an application in place by Dec. 31, said Mark Klose, chairman of the commission.

The commission also finalized an agreement purchasing a perpetual easement on 22 acres of land from Ryan Odenbach. The land will be restored to a wetland and used as mitigation acres to replace wetlands destroyed by road construction projects.

The purchase price for the easement was $5,000 per acre with the county assuming responsibility for plugging the drainage ditches necessary to restore the lands to a wetland status. Because of ratios in the wetlands mitigation process the county will be able to use the parcel as a bank of 17.42 acres to draw upon in current and future projects.

“Projects already done use about 8 acres,” said Steve Thompson, project engineer for Interstate Engineering. “The balance we carry into next year of about 9 acres will last a couple of years, depending on weather.”

Sun reporter Keith Norman can be reached at (701) 952-8452 or by e-mail at knorman@jamestownsun.com

Tags: local news, news, county, trucks, fccnetwork