By JONATHAN ZWEYGARDT
Hays Post
A Munjor resident is asking for help cleaning up his town.
Larry Roada approached the Ellis County Commission at Monday night’s meeting asking the county for help cleaning up a number of properties that are in disrepair.
“We’ve got extra vehicles in yards, yards need to be mowed and kept up, we’re having a lot of problems with rodents,” Roada said, adding he believes many of the properties are “health hazards.”
According to County Counselor Bill Jeter, a state Supreme Court decision does not allow the county the same authority as cities to clean up or abate nuisances.
“Counties do not have the authority to abate a nuisance,” Jeter said. “We can only enforce county resolutions by fine or by some sort of restraining order. … But we don’t have the ability to go in and clean up the property and assess those costs back against the owner.”
Roada said there is an even a person living in a home that has been condemned and is boarded up.
Commissioner Barb Wasinger said they would get Roada in contact with someone with the Kansas health department to examine that situation.
County Commissioner Dean Haselhorst said he was in Munjor over the weekend and said he saw a number of properties that need cleaned up.
Haselhorst also brought up the idea of Munjor becoming an incorporated community.
He said Gorham recently passed ordinances allowing it to clean up rundown properties.
Haselhorst said since they began the process of cleaning up, “it’s a different town than it was a year ago.”
“If you don’t clean it up, they clean it up for you and you get a bill,” he said of the cleanup process in Gorham.
The commission asked Jeter to provide information on what it would take for Munjor to become incorporated.
Jeter is expected to provide the commission with the information at its first meeting in April.
In other business at Monday’s meeting:
• County Administrator Greg Sund informed the commission he received and will accept a proposal for a new sound system for the basement meeting room of the Administrative Center. Sund said the system will cost $19,078.
• After meeting for 30 minutes in an executive session, the commission also voted to give Sund a 2-percent raise. The pay increase is the same as what both elected and non-elected county employees received for 2015.
• Darin Myers, the incoming Rural Fire Chief was also introduced at Monday’s meeting. His first day will be March 30.