The Daily Inter Lake

Flathead County has been fined almost $29,000 by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality for air quality violations related to road dust.

In a Jan. 11 letter, the agency alleged that the county failed to take "reasonable precautions to control emissions of airborne particulate matter" on its gravel roads, as required by state law.

In addition to the fine, the county has until April 1 to submit a written plan and timeline detailing how it intends to reduce dust on county roads; the plan must be implemented within 30 days after it's approved by the state agency.

The agency offered to suspend $18,200 of the penalty if the county fully complies with the order. Failure to comply could result in additional fines of as much as $10,000 a day.

State officials say this is the first time any Montana county has been cited for this type of violation. The violation notice suggests the only reason things reached this point was because previous efforts to resolve the matter were ignored.

"We tried to handle it informally," said Larry Alheim Jr., an environmental enforcement specialist with the Department of Environmental Quality. "Then we got a little more formal. We issued a warning letter, then we issued a violation letter, letting the county know we might initiate a formal enforcement effort. We didn't get a response, so the department felt this was an appropriate next step."

Road dust is a constant source of aggravation for county residents - particularly during the summer, when the Road Department and county commissioners are flooded with complaints.

However, there are several hundred miles of gravel or dirt roads in the valley, and the county doesn't have the money to pave them all. It can't offer a permanent solution to the problem, which leaves some irate citizens looking to the state for answers.

"Since 1998, we've received 53 complaints regarding road dust in Flathead County," Alheim said. "Lewis and Clark was the next closest county, with 23 complaints."

The violation notice indicates that the agency received seven complaints from nine people about excess road dust in the Flathead in 2005. Last year, it received nine complaints from 42 people.

When a complaint comes in, Alheim said, he typically issues an informal warning letter, reminding counties of the "reasonable precautions" rule and asking officials to contact the complainant and try to resolve the issue.

Prior to sending the formal warning letter last summer, he also did an onsite inspection on Jellison, Conn and Trumble Creek roads to verify the complaints.

Flathead County's Road Department has received at least a dozen informal warning letters in the last two years. It doesn't have the resources to fix the problem, though, so the letters just go in a drawer. The state's formal warning letter and violation letter may have inadvertently suffered the same fate.

"I think the view was that the state has been sending us these letters for years, so what's different?" said Chief Deputy County Attorney Jonathan Smith. "They keep sending us letters, we keep ignoring them, so why stop now? We don't have the money to cure the problem, so we just put the letters in a drawer and do what we can."

County Administrator Mike Pence said the violation notice and fine came as something of a surprise, given the history of ongoing complaints.

"We recognize that there's a problem, but we also recognize that there's a lack of funding to deal with the problem," Pence said. "It would have been nice to get a phone call [from DEQ] to talk about the situation."

Officials here have assumed that complying with the state's "reasonable precautions" rule means paving roads.

However, Alheim said other counties satisfy the requirement in a variety of ways - including bumping the cost of controlling road dust back onto homeowners or developers.

Some of the more common options, Alheim said, include reducing speed limits on gravel roads; enforcing the existing speed limits; issuing permits to allow homeowners to do their own dust suppression, such as oiling the road in front of their homes; requiring the business or development that's causing the additional traffic to do dust mitigation; or offering homeowners an opportunity to form a rural special improvement district to pay for paving the road.

Pence said Flathead County is pursuing several of these alternatives. For example, it recently formed four special improvement districts, at the request of the affected homeowners, and it's hoping to convince homeowners in the Creston and Lower Valley areas to form their own improvement districts later this year.

The districts typically sell bonds to pay for road or infrastructure improvements. Homeowners living within the district are then assessed an annual fee to pay off the bond.

(Property owners have the right to protest the formation of an improvement district, as well as the amount of the assessment. However, most new subdivisions approved by Flathead County in the last year or so included waivers that prohibit homeowners or developers from protesting the formation of a district.)

"I think improvement districts will be a major part of the [road dust] solution," Pence said. "They're an opportunity for property owners to improve the value of their land and to improve their quality of life."

The county is working on other alternatives as well, such as impact fees for new subdivisions.

Homeowners in some rural areas have suggested that the county should simply stop approving new subdivisions until the developers or county can afford to pave the roads. The commissioners occasionally discuss that idea, but have never seriously considered it.

Moreover, the success of the special improvement district option may depend on new subdivisions and their waivers of protest, which could be used to offset protests from existing homeowners.

Smith said Flathead County intends to appeal DEQ's violation notice, as provided for by law. It will lay out the various options available to county residents for controlling road dust, in hopes of working out a settlement with the state and reducing the fine.

A date for the appeal hearing hasn't yet been set.

Reporter Bill Spence may be reached at 758-4459 or by e-mail at bspence@dailyinterlake.com