Local legislator wants to fix village law By Dave Abner BDN Staff Writer dabner@bransondailynews.com (Editor's Note: This story is the first of two parts.) Dennis Wood is on a mission to right a wrong. Wood, 62nd District Representative in the Missouri House of Representatives, hopes to repeal a law passed last year that provides landowners a loophole to circumvent county authority. BACKGROUND The 2007 law, passed with little fanfare, provoked considerable controversy after the fact when a Lebanon tycoon tried to incorporate about 400 private acres in Stone County as a village. Pending legislation before the Missouri General Assembly would repeal an amendment in last session's Senate Bill 22 – commonly called the village law – that allows landowners to incorporate a village that would not be required to abide by some county guidelines. The new amendment sets no minimum population for an area to become a village and requires no streets, businesses, schools, parks, churches or other entities that might normally be in a town. The amendment would also seemingly render a village exempt from county planning and zoning requirements. The law took effect Aug. 28. The same day, five residents living on the Route DD peninsula north of Kimberling City petitioned the Stone County Commission to incorporate a 400-acre tract along DD, a part of the Evergreen Corporation, as a village. Lebanon developer Robert Plaster owns the tract and is Evergreen's president and chairman. The five petitioners are Plaster employees. Plaster's name did not appear on the petition. In November, Stone County commissioners denied the petition by unanimous vote. The commission's denial prompted a lawsuit from petition supporters. HOW DID IT HAPPEN? If the SB 22 amendment is such a bad law, how did it become law in the first place? The answer depends on who gives it. The amendment was tacked on as an 11th-hour substitution in the waning days of last year's legislative session, Wood said. And nobody caught it. Wood (R-Kimberling City) said, under normal conditions, somebody should have noticed the last-minute addition. "I've never missed a vote in six years (in office)," Wood said. "I am sincere about my job. "Things don't slip by me." But he admits this one thing did. Slipped by everybody, in fact. Wood said, "A hundred and sixty-three House members didn't catch it. Thirty-four senators didn't catch it." After the measure was approved by the General Assembly and before the governor signed it, officials from the Missouri Association of Counties noted the oversight. Wood said, "MAC caught it and brought it to my attention." So, who made the 11th-hour change? According to Wood, Missouri Speaker of the House Rod Jetton (R-Marble Hill). The amendment was part of a much larger bill – about 200 pages. The original bill had been debated on the House floor. After the debate, Wood said, Jetton ordered the change and legislators voted on the amendment without ever debating last-minute additions. Wood was told by the House research director that Jetton dropped off a change in the bill to the research director's department, asked staffers to draft the change in legal language and returned later to pick up the revision. The revised version was the bill approved in last year's session. Wood had to initially do some detective work to even unearth the fact that Jetton was behind the change. Once Wood and others discovered the 11th-hour revision, Jetton was largely silent about his reasons for the new amendment. He still has little to say about what happened last session. Contacted recently by telephone, Jetton's communications director, Barry Bennett, said, "Chances are about one in a thousand he'll talk to you about it. "It's the last thing he wants to talk about." Several pointed questions were required before Bennett would even say that the revision was Jetton's creation. Bennett ultimately said, "He (Jetton) sponsored that amendment." • • • (Coming in Part Two: Why did Rod Jetton make the change? What's wrong with the village law? What are the chances for repairing last year's mistake?) -- http://www.bransonedge.com http://www.bransonmissouri.blogspot.com