Private eye to investigate planning office

A private investigator will look into alleged wrongdoings by Flathead County Planning Director Jeff Harris and the office he oversees after county commissioners voted last Thursday to sign a $5,000 contract with Moonlighting Detective Agency.

Private investigator Ike Eisentraut will begin his investigation this week into claims made by property-rights group American Dream Montana that Harris flouted open meeting and records laws and circulated inappropriate e-mails around his office.

"I welcome the investigation," Harris said last Friday. "We will fully cooperate."

Harris was preparing a response document to rebut each allegation that he said he would present to the commissioners early this week.

Harris said the commissioners have kept him informed of their proposed plan of action, so the announcement that a private detective would be investigating his actions came as no surprise.

"I certainly support their decision," he said. "We want to be as transparent as possible and show the public exactly what we did."

While the private investigation into those accusations is ongoing, county clerk and recorder Paula Robinson should be presenting the findings of her financial audit of the office this week. Former county commissioner Dale Williams presented a long list of alleged financial violations to the commissioners earlier this month and called for Harris' immediate resignation or dismissal.

In a letter to the editor to the West Shore News, Williams laid out many of those allegations, including improper use of county credit cards, outlandish travel costs and improper and extravagant meal purchases. In addition to Harris' resignation, Williams also called for certain planning department employees to be suspended without pay.

"County policies regarding per-diem, credit cards, handling of warrants, travel summaries and questionable purchases certainly lend credence to the fact we have the wrong man in place on the job," he wrote. "After all, the business community would not allow this in their world, why as County taxpayers should we allow it in ours?"

Harris has found himself in the eye of the storm recently after coming under fire for his office's participation in a private Yahoo! group Web forum that members of the Lakeside Neighborhood Plan Committee used to communicate and send documents. The Yahoo! group has since been shut down on the advice of the county attorney's office, but paper copies of correspondence were printed and filed.

About the same time in mid-June, a few residents from the Lakeside-Somers area raised very vocal objections to the planning office's handling of re-starting a neighborhood plan effort in Somers. That meeting, held at Somers Middle School, escalated into a confrontation between members of the public and planning staff — including Harris — and Flathead County Sheriff's deputies were called to the scene.

Shortly thereafter, area residents and members of American Dream Montana held a well-attended gathering at the Red Lion hotel in Kalispell where they laid out a case against Harris and circulated a petition for a private investigation of the planning office. A week later Lakeside resident Donna Thorton, Kalispell attorney and mayoral candidate Tammi Fisher and Williams presented the commissioners with their list of allegations that included misuse of county funds, abuse of county credit cards, "deliberate disregard for transparency in government," unfair treatment of certain applications submitted to the planning office and abuse of the vast authority inherent with the planning director's many roles, giving him "wide authority with little accountability."

Among the allegations of impropriety is a lunch Harris had with members of the Bigfork Land Use Advisory Committee in May of last year. That meeting at Eagle Bend Golf Club prompted Deputy County Attorney Jonathan Smith to caution BLUAC to be more careful about public notice in the future since a quorum was present.

Reflecting on that meeting, Harris said that it "wasn't a meeting to make decisions, it was a working lunch. But regardless, it should have had notices."

He added that the county's 17 local land use advisory committees are responsible for their own public noticing, not the planning office.

Harris said that since the allegations were leveled against him at the commissioners meeting on July 1, he's dedicated about 75 percent of his time gathering information and compiling responses.

"Individual planners have spent inordinate amounts of their time finding information and preparing responses," he said. "Translated into dollars, it is a substantial amount."