Public hearing set for Ephrata annexation

EPHRATA — The public hearing on a contested Ephrata annexation is scheduled for Tuesday.

A group of Ephrata homeowners are challenging the city’s annexation of a 0.73 acre piece of land at a Boundary Review Board hearing. It starts at 7 p.m. in the Grant County commissioner’s hearing room on the second floor of the courthouse in Ephrata.

The Greenfield Homeowners Associations collected enough signatures to petition the Grant County Boundary Review Board for a public hearing on the annexation. The Ephrata City Council agreed to sending the request to the board for approval in November.

Larry Lenssen, the property’s owner, requested the annexation of the property south of the city, after he asked the county for an exception allowing him to build a house, said Ephrata City Administrator Wes Crago.

An adjacent property was annexed into the city in 1994. The county planners consider the 0.73 acre piece of land next to it part of the larger piece, but was left off the annexation request, Crago said. Part of the smaller property was sitting inside the area the city can expand into. This area is referred to as the urban growth area (UGA.)

The dispute about the property revolves around whether the proper procedures were followed to include it in the UGA.

Calvin Kooy, the Greenfield Homeowners Association president, doesn’t object to Lenssen’s plans to build a house on the property, but questions how the property ended up in the UGA. He pointed out Lenssen specifically asked for the property to be excluded when the larger piece next to it was annexed in 1994.

Kooy also points out two maps, the first from July 14, 2006, showing the boundary running along the edge of the property and the second, from two weeks later, showing the line running through the property. So far he hasn’t found any documentation indicating why the line was moved.

County Planning Manager Damien Hooper said he did not know why the line was redrawn, but it’s reasonable to assume someone asked to include it in UGA.

“But that’s not what we’re talking about here. The UGA is completely unrelated to (the boundary review board) or the annexation,” he said.

Since the county considers the 0.73 acre piece of land and the larger piece adjacent to it as one parcel, it falls under a county code prohibiting the boundary from cutting through a parcel of land.