Rowan showed leadership

This would be a response to Think Carefully

While I realize the letter is mainly meant to be a campaign smear I do perceive a slight to how the town has done business.

A little background is the city's sewer lagoons have been in danger of being swallowed up by the river so they had to be relocated. The Lawyers were approached with the best site for this project. They agreed to sell.

By law the town can only pay appraisal plus 10%. We procured an independent appraisal that was $186,450.00. This was rejected by them as not enough money for the 10 acres.

The town decided the only option to pursue imminent domain as the only option to procure the property and have more latitude on how much we could pay.

Nick told us he would sell it to us for $750,000.00 and if we went to court it would cost us 1.2 million for it. We set it up with the court and they sent us to mediation.

The agreed settlement was $470,000.00 and the town would need to move the irrigation well to a location of their choice.

This was signed by both parties and Nick agreed it was a fair price albeit on the low end.

The check is cashed and several months later we are still without a deed. Now we are in danger of losing our funding. The mayor went to Nick and was informed that he would give it to him if we signed another agreement. It looked innocuous and being under the gun it was signed and the deed sent to our funders.

Work begins and the Lawyers file with the court to keep us off the property.

Eventually they file to get things back in court and once again we are sent to mediation.

At the end of this we have the location of where they want the well and agreed to pay another $10,000.00 to close out the whole deal.

According to the letter they wrote there was a dozen things left to do when in fact there is 1.Had they told us where they wanted it located the well and could have been done 3 months ago when we had a well driller here for another project.

As far as intimidation threats not sure where that would come from. Possibly the retired judge for the last mediation did not like their coloring outside the lines. He was very much to the point from what we saw.

In the end the town paid them $480,000.00 and this was above all our other costs.

All this to say we have done everything we can for our citizens to save our sewage lagoons. And thank you Dan Rowen for your leadership and temperament through this process

Without Wax,

Chris Allen,

Plains