Four Judge Magney-area property owners attended a February 22, 2011 public hearing with the county board regarding assessments for a survey of eight sections of land conducted by Wayne Hensche on behalf of Cook County. Three of them took issue with the survey and the assessment. Unfortunately, Hensche got stuck at the airport in Chicago due to weather and couldn’t be there to answer anyone’s questions.
Property owner Tim White said his land is enrolled in a sustainable forestry covenant with the State of Minnesota that will not allow any development on it. “There’s no benefit in the survey for me,” he said.
Dan Hubbartt and his father, Del Hubbartt, traveled 320 miles from Red Wing, Minnesota to be at the hearing. They each own two of the 16 parcels in Section 17. Dan Hubbartt said he was under the understanding that much of that section had already been properly surveyed. A written report from Hensche talked about former unlicensed timber cruising “surveys” that had been wrong in that section, however. He also mentioned another survey that used an inferior differential global positioning system that is skewed by tree canopy.
Dan Hubbartt suggested that more of the property owners in Section 18 were “from town,” whereas a lot of the property owners in Section 17 were “not from town,” he said. “It should be equitable, and this does not seem equitable at all.”
Dan Hubbartt said Hensche had told him that 75 percent of the corners in Section 17 had already been delineated. He’s an air traffic controller, he said, and the properties could be easily delineated by latitude and longitude. Property owner Tom Fiero countered by saying that survey corners do not necessarily correspond to latitude and longitude lines.
Hensche listed the cost of the survey at $66,874.70, with a cost per acre of $32.97. While he surveyed about 5,000 acres, the owners of only about 2,000 of those acres – 46 different individuals or groups — will share the greatest share of the cost, since the DNR owns most of the rest of the land that was surveyed. Judge Magney State Park is in the middle of the tract. The federal government owns about 80 acres as well.
According to Auditor-Treasurer Braidy Powers, “We negotiated with the DNR and they agreed to pay $7,500 toward the survey and they have already paid that. The federal government always refuses to join in the cost. That leaves the private owners to pay the rest.”
Powers said state statute requires that assessing for the cost of the survey must be done in an “equitable” way.
The hearing continues
On March 15, the public hearing was re-opened but continued yet again after a discussion on how the costs would be assessed took a new turn.
In Cook County, the cost of a boundary commission has typically been divided up equally by the acre. If this were done, the owner of the biggest property would pay about $1,323. Fifteen out of the approximately 50 owners in the area have “really small” properties, Hensche said, leaving some of them with assessments of less than $66. “Fifty percent of the owners are small owners,” he said, “and they’re sticking it to the large owners.” He suggested that the board consider charging a minimum fee since corners and lines had to be established on all properties, no matter how small.
Another way to divide the cost would be to charge by the parcel, which Hensche figured would cost about $1,330 each. “That’s a bargain,” Hensche said. “Thirteen hundred dollars to be made whole?”
“…I’ve been spending the last three weeks trying to put out the spot fires with the big owners because they feel they’re being taken advantage of by the small owners,” Hensche said.
Some of the parcels hadn’t had a proper survey done for 150 years, Hensche said.
Dan and Dell Hubbartt, the father and son who each own large parcels in the survey area, who attended the hearing in February but did not travel back to Cook County for this one. They did, however, speak with Hensche and expressed satisfaction with the possibility of a minimum charge to spread the cost around a bit more.
The board passed a motion establishing a $650 minimum for the survey. This can be written off one’s federal income taxes, Hensche said. The hearing will reconvene at 11 a.m. Tuesday, April 19, giving residents another opportunity to speak up.
“We’ll get this done yet!” Commissioner Jim Johnson said. “I want to thank Wayne for all his work behind the scenes.” Hensche said he has GPS coordinates available to property owners for cabins and roads in the area, accurate to 3-15 feet under tree canopy.
Leave a Reply