Highland bond appeal gets dismissal hearing date

WASHINGTON — A court order filed Monday afternoon set the date for a dismissal hearing on an appeal case that could overturn a passed bond referendum in the Highland School District.

The order signed by District Court Judge Crystal Cronk said the hearing was scheduled April 4 at 10 a.m. at the Washington County Courthouse, with a stipulation that it would be, “limited to 15 minutes, as this is a court service day.” The document invited legal counsel in the case to request a different date if more time was needed, and included a phone number with which to do so.

It’s not clear whether the parties involved plan to seek a longer or later hearing. The original proceedings in January took over two hours to resolve, although it involved a 20-minute wait for one late-running witness, and a far greater number of legal questions than the school district’s request for a dismissal of the appeal.

The bond election challenge was first heard by a “contest court” in January, a group of three representatives assembled specifically to assess the legality of a challenged election’s result. That panel was composed of challenge petitioner Ron Greiner, Highland school board Vice President Dan Ruth, and retired attorney Richard Gaumer, who a judge appointed as a neutral third member.

That panel voted 2-1 in favor of upholding the bond’s passage, despite findings that improperly distributed ballots in Ainsworth on Election Day allowed up to 96 people to vote on the bond who didn’t live in the school district, and therefore lacked the right to influence its property taxes. The error may have swayed the outcome of the $15 million school bond measure, which passed by just 22 votes, although county officials said there was no way to know how or if those 96 voters filled out their ballots, or to determine who they were.

Gaumer and Ruth, comprising the contest court’s majority, cited state laws that limited election reversals to cases where removing a flawed precinct would change the outcome. In this case, it would not: ballots at every other precinct would still add up to a passing margin for the bond issue, with or without the inclusion of Ainsworth’s in-person voters.

Highland’s lawyers have asked judges to dismiss the appeal, filing a motion on Tuesday for a summary judgment in the schools’ favor without a holding a trial.

The attorneys argued that petitioners presented no legal errors in the contest court’s ruling, and said the challengers lacked any evidence that poll worker errors in Ainsworth were sufficient to alter the bond referendum’s outcome.

“While unfortunate and in all likelihood inadvertent by the election officials at the Ainsworth Precinct, this ‘misconduct’ would not have altered the result of the election upon the public measure,” the attorneys wrote in one court document. “Because the result of the vote upon the public measure is not changed by rejection of the votes in the Ainsworth Precinct, this election challenge falls firmly within the prescriptions of Iowa Code (which) requires that the ‘misconduct…shall not be held sufficient to set aside the election.’”

School officials have tentatively hoped to wrap up the legal battle before July 1, when the new fiscal year will mark the end of the current debt service levy needed to finance the $15 million bond proposal. Superintendent Ken Crawford said last month that any further delay would push back construction timelines, potentially giving time for construction costs to outgrow the $15 million bond’s budget.

“We all know that costs on construction, cement, all that kind of stuff, don’t go down,” he said in an interview in February. “The longer this is, the less we’re going to be able to buy with our $15 million … we’re going to basically get less for our money, and that’s what’s going to hurt kids, and that’s what’s going to hurt families.”

Reporter’s note: this story was edited at 11 a.m. Wednesday, March 12, shortly after its original publication, to account for previously unreported files added to the court docket Tuesday afternoon.

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com