Residents asked for their own city to avoid Johnson County development. Board says no
The Miami County Board of Commissioners on Wednesday rejected a petition asking to incorporate a new city in Kansas, an effort led by rural residents fighting to stop ever-encroaching industrial development from taking over their land.
“It was very disappointing to hear the vote,” resident Charlie Koch said. “This kind of comes as a left hook.”
Roughly 300 Miami County residents — who live in the unincorporated outskirts of Edgerton’s sprawling industrial park in southwestern Johnson County — filed the petition to form their own town: the city of Golden. They argued that their own city borders would have protected their agriculture and residential land, which has become increasingly surrounded by warehouses and semi trucks.
Edgerton leaders tout the growth at the massive Logistics Park Kansas City, which has brought corporate giants like Amazon and Hostess, as well as thousands of jobs and additional tax revenue, to the tiny town of 1,700. But for several years, the development has come with opposition from neighbors, who worry about the environmental impacts, noise and traffic, as well as city tax incentives offered to the developer, NorthPoint.
But as the park quickly expands, hopping over Interstate 35 and closer to rural homes and farmland, tension has continued to boil. Despite objections from dozens of homeowners, the Edgerton City Council earlier this year rezoned nearly 700 acres of rural land, annexed into the city, to make way for more industrial growth south of Interstate 35.
Miami County residents — who don’t live in the city limits, so are unable to vote for Edgerton mayor or City Council members — argued that officials ignore their concerns, and believe it’s only a matter of time before more farmland is sold and annexed into the city, and concrete replaces their green, open pastures.
But Wednesday afternoon, Miami County commissioners voted 3-1 to deny the proposal.
“The sparse, rural nature of the proposed city boundaries would be ill served by the governmental burdens that a city requires,” Commissioner George Pretz said. “Formation of a city would create an additional level of many things, just to mention a few, additional level of property tax and many regulations.”
Incorporation of the new city required a unanimous vote of the five-member board. But officials previously said that Commissioner Danny Gallagher had recused himself from discussions and the vote, concerned about a conflict of interest.
Commissioner Tyler Vaughan was the only one in favor of incorporating the new city.
“Ultimately if the city of Golden doesn’t happen within the next year, Edgerton could be in our county,” he said, adding that the incorporation of Golden would have offered residents a chance to determine how they want their community to progress.
“We have a city that wants to form to basically protect and define their progress,” Vaughan said. “Then for us to say ‘no,’ it kind of goes in contrast with what we’ve done traditionally, to say we support cities. And this is a city being proposed by residents of our own county that are familiar with what they want, and are electing people to put in positions to help make those decisions to speak on their behalf.”
Forming a new city is a rare event in Kansas, where only five new towns have been incorporated since 1980, according to the Kansas League of Municipalities. The last city to form was Highlands, just outside of Hutchinson, in 2017. In recent years, it’s been more common for small, declining towns like Freeport and Frederick to seek to disband.
The proposed city of Golden would have sat just south of the Johnson County line, with more than 770 residents.
Before Wednesday’s vote, commissioners held public meetings and gathered input and evidence from state and local experts, on how the city would affect the environment, economy and other factors.
Commissioners considered several factors, required under Kansas law, including population density, the effect on adjacent areas and the town’s ability to provide basic services.
“In the general sense, you create a city so that you can expand that level of service and provide a different level than what the county would or could or should provide,” Commissioner Rob Roberts said. “All along here, at least as I interpret it, there has been no intention to provide any deeper services than what are provided today.”
Koch contended that, “providing services was never the point of us wanting to form Golden. It was to give people of the area a voice in the development and some representation that we don’t have at this point.”
Some residents signed a petition opposed to the creation of Golden. Attorney Darcy Domoney of Paola previously said he represented about 100 residents in the surrounding area, who worried about additional taxes being imposed after the city is incorporated, among other concerns.
Roberts warned that by forming the city, residents would have been tasked with several logistical and financial challenges.
Residents have said they might not need their own City Hall, but they would have needed to elect a mayor and city council. Roberts said the town also would need a city clerk, treasurer and possibly other staff to maintain records and handle city business.
Other costs could come from infrastructure, as well as possibly contracting with the sheriff’s office, the county attorney and other entities to provide a higher level of service than currently offered to unincorporated areas.
“The demands on that new government will be minimal to start with, but eventually will escalate,” Roberts said.
Residents pushing for the creation of Golden argued that forming the city would have helped preserve the area as it is, and that residents would be happy continuing services similar to what are provided today, without much more paid in property taxes.
They maintain that they are not against development, but they want control over how it occurs.
Residents proposed naming the city Golden, after one of the state’s most important planning and zoning court cases. In Golden vs. City of Overland Park, in 1978, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled on the so-called “Golden factors” — the criteria that local governments must consider when weighing zoning decisions.
The neighbors have disagreed with Edgerton’s decisions to rezone hundreds of acres for industrial development. And they worry about harm that could be done to the Hillsdale watershed, the source of drinking water for more than 56,000 people, if warehouses continue to proliferate.
Edgerton city officials, though, have argued that the industrial park has overwhelmingly benefited the city, which despite the massive industrial development, continues to struggle to attract residential and commercial growth. They believe the added jobs and tax revenue are spurring growth throughout the entire region.
“I think the warehousing, as a development, I think it could possibly help if they come,” Miami County Commissioner Phil Dixon said, which was met with vocal disapproval from the crowd at Wednesday’s meeting.
Though the effort has been driven by the development in and around Edgerton, Mayor Donald Roberts said the decision wasn’t for his town to make.
“Whatever the result is, the result is,” he said. “I’m sure it’s a hard decision for the Miami County Board of Commissioners.”
Roberts said the city would continue to try to build bridges with people within the proposed Golden city limits.
“We want to be good neighbors,” he said. “We represent our people of Edgerton, but we’ve always had the focus of being a good neighbor, whether it’s the city of Gardner or Miami County or whoever.”
As he previously testified, the mayor said Edgerton will likely annex parts of Miami County soon. That could be for residential growth, industrial development or a combination. But he said Edgerton won’t forcibly annex any land; it will only do so at the invitation of property owners.
“At some point, we would anticipate we’re a part of Miami County,” he said, “and we’d like to have a beneficial relationship with the county and the area residents.”
Many of the residents in unincorporated Miami County said they were left speechless by the decision. While neighbors continue to protest development proposals being considered by the city of Edgerton, it is unclear how they might proceed now that Golden has been denied.
“We’ll have to regroup and determine what to do next,” Koch said.
This story was originally published October 13, 2021 at 3:04 PM.
