Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
The town of Farmington will have a new zoning map drawn after realizing they have none.
The original could not be found after an extensive search.
It began the first week of May when town resident and business owner Mark Hellinger filed for a permit to build an office next to his Audiopile warehouse – a sound components supplier.
City building inspector Bob Hill came out to look and, filling out a question on a form, asked how the property is zoned.
Hellinger told him he had no documentation but understood it as “commercial.”
He then went to city hall to check the map.
“Long story short, I came away empty-handed,” Hellinger said.
So a search ensued.
Farmington City Clerk-Treasurer Barbara Dial pulled out the town’s original zoning ordinance booklet.
“That book kept referring to the official map,” said Dial.
She contacted former Farmington mayors Royce Johnson and Jerry Wagner.
“Yeah, I’ve seen the map before,” said Johnson, who served as mayor from 1985 - 2008. “But I have no idea where it is. I know I’ve seen it. It had shading, colors or cross-hatching or something.”
He later walked down to city hall – on the first floor of the Farmington Community Building, a 1908 Masonic Lodge now on the National Register of Historic Places – and helped look.
“According to all the old-timers, there was about a 2 x 2 map that hung on the wall when city hall was in the old fire station,” said Dial.
She and Hellinger checked with Whitman County Planning and Zoning, the Washington state archives in Cheney and WSU archives.
“It may be the last time this was visited was 1980-81,” Hellinger said, noting a town ordinance which created the last map – a copy of which was left on the windowsill of the house on the property he bought 20 years ago.
Johnson, in late May, climbed the staircase at city hall to check two old coat closets next to the Masons’ former grand room. The city had long used the closets as storage space.
Inside one, he found a box marked “zoning.”
Filed inside that was a public notice from the Dec. 4, 1980, Tekoa Standard-Register newspaper of record – the last time the town adopted new zoning ordinances. The article included a picture of the map, but still no map.
Dial, Public Works Director George Marzall and town resident David Vaudron then looked through cabinets at the old fire department where city hall (and the town library) once was.
“My gut is telling me it was loaned to an engineering firm and never returned,” said Dial. “I’ve jumped through all the hoops.”
Last Monday, city council member Noreen Ewing and her daughter came in and suggested that the map may have fallen behind a drawer in the city’s map cabinet, which holds Farmington’s sewer maps, water system charts and more.
They slid out all of the drawers and found nothing.
The map cabinet is kept in the clerk’s office but was once set out in the foyer near the building’s main entrance.
Dial then conferred with other former Farmington clerks. Forrest Miller and Jenna McDonald said that during their tenures there they had never been asked to issue a zoning amendment or anything related.
“We didn’t have that much going on to worry about zoning,” said Johnson.
Farmington has fourzones: Agricultural, Residential, Commercial and Industrial. “The old U.P. property was classified as industrial,” said Johnson, referring to Union Pacific land where grain elevators stand today.
City hall was moved from the old fire station in 1995.
Candace Fisher, now Finance Director for the City of Colfax, recalls seeing the zoning map in the map cabinet during her 15 years as Farmington’s Clerk-Treasurer from 1994-2009.
“We never did rule on anything,” she said of any zoning matter, which was discussed with the mayor.
Did anyone build anything during that time?
“Very rarely,” she said. “A church was renovated into a home. We did have one house built that I recall.”
Hellinger put up the Audiopile warehouse in 2003 on the site of an old potato processing plant. At that time, he and wife Liz got their building inspection through Whitman County, which Farmington had contracted for inspections. The subject of zoning never came up.
Today, Farmington Planning Commission chairman Max Mohan will now head the effort to draw a new map. The commission was set to convene this week to begin.
“It’s going to be an expensive, long, drawn-out process,” Mohan said.
“Zoning has no effect on the past. It has little to do with the here and now,” Hellinger said. “Zoning to me is absolutely instrumental to a town’s future. If somebody wants to build a RV park or a golf course, there’s a good chance they’d want to check the zoning map. It’s one of those things you have down at city hall.”
As for the original, it remains a mystery.
“There’s all kinds of theories,” said Fisher. “There’s a lot of people with access to the community center. It’s hard telling what could’ve happened. When I left it was there. I believe so.”
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
Reader Comments(0)