Judge dismisses Lakeside planning lawsuit

A lawsuit alleging open-record violations and challenging the planning process for the Lakeside Neighborhood Plan has been thrown out of court.

Flathead District Judge Stewart Stadler dismissed the case on Friday, thwarting a request for a jury trial by a group of Lakeside area neighbors. The case had been scheduled for a December trial on the remaining legal issue of whether the Lakeside Neighborhood Planning Committee destroyed public records pertaining to the neighborhood planning process.

A group of 19 Lakeside area property owners sued the county and Lakeside committee in 2009, challenging the neighborhood planning process and claiming violations of open meeting and record laws. Since then, six of seven legal issues in the lawsuit have been decided in Flathead County’s favor.

Kalispell attorney Noah Bodman, one of the lawyers for the property owners, said it’s “extremely likely” the decision would be appealed once the final judgment has been entered into the court.

Last week Stadler lifted a court order that had prevented a 2010 update of the Lakeside Neighborhood Plan from taking effect.

In his latest ruling, Stadler said the property owners’ amended complaint doesn’t request any relief specific to the alleged destruction of public records and noted that voiding the Lakeside plan isn’t an available remedy.

The judge earlier had concluded that voiding the Lakeside Neighborhood Plan is not an available remedy. The remedy the property owners sought — a declaration that the “draft Lakeside Neighborhood Plan is illegal and unconstitutional and therefore of no force and effect” — was not available, Stadler concluded.

Bodman said he disagrees with the judge’s assertion that there was no remedy available to the plaintiffs because they didn’t request the plan be voided.

“The first paragraph of the complaint and in many other places in the complaint, we request the voiding of the plan,” Bodman said.

Plaintiff attorney Rich DeJana of Kalispell, who joined the case after the amended complaint was filed, said dismissing the case and vacating the trial will allow the property owners to directly take their case to the state Supreme Court.

“We’re pleased to see we avoided trying part of the case and then going up” to the high court, DeJana said.

DeJana said he sees “a lot of things superficially wrong with Stadler’s decision,” such as recognizing the planning committee had violated certain laws but then not finding any remedy for those violations.

The lawsuit stemmed from an allegation that the Lakeside committee used a members-only Yahoo group website and later destroyed some public records connected to that private website.

Those public records include emails related to the Yahoo site and a number of records the committee had stored on a personal computer that were either lost or destroyed, Bodman said.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.