More delay in church case, but St. John City Council can’t hide forever | Opinion

As I write this, I was supposed to be in St. John, covering a court hearing on whether Mike Rousseau and Dorothy Tobe will ever get to move into a long-abandoned church they bought to be their Kansas home on the range.

But that’ll have to wait, because two of the three members of the St. John City Council who voted against allowing the couple to move in apparently have more important things to do.

The council members were supposed to be witnesses, called to testify in District Court as to why they won’t approve a permit to allow the couple to occupy the formerly run-down building that had been used for personal storage for at least the past 20 years — even after they made repairs and renovations that passed a building inspection for residential occupancy.

It’s an explanation that Rousseau and Tobe have been waiting for since April, when a tight-lipped council voted 3-2 for denial after the city’s planning and zoning board had recommended approval.

It’s now been a full year since the married couple, who are in their 60s, came to St. John.

They were displaced from Denver after the modest home they’d rented for 30 years was sold to an apartment developer and they couldn’t find replacement housing they could afford anywhere except rural Kansas.

The court delay requested by the city attorney now pushes their period of homelessness to at least 13 months, as the hearing’s been rescheduled for Aug. 23.

In the meantime, things have gotten slightly better for Rousseau and Tobe. A supporter with a vacant house in St. John has lent them the use of it, so they can sleep there and spend their days at the property they own.

That means they no longer have to bed down in their real estate agent’s guest room in another town, as they’d been doing since July 2023.

That’s important.

The city’s first attempt to run the couple out of town a year ago was to file criminal charges against them for sleeping in the church building on the first few nights they got to St. John. Those charges were eventually dropped without explanation.

Community supporters have raised sufficient funds for the couple to afford a lawyer on this go-round, Mark Tremaine of Sterling.

He said he’s never seen anything like this.

“We don’t know what they (council members) based their decision on,” he said. “All the cases I’ve researched, there’s not a single case where the governing body had made a decision with no public explanation.”

The council members voting against the couple’s permit said nothing but “nay,” (I was there) and Tremaine says it raises the question “What’s the purpose of a public meeting?”

It’s a valid question. Courts have ruled that governing bodies are not acting in their legislative role when deciding zoning cases, but in a quasi-judicial role. That means they should make and issue findings of fact and law justifying their decisions.

But St. John is a law unto itself.

There is no conceivable reason why Rousseau and Tobe shouldn’t be allowed to live in the structure they bought, except that it’s at the outer edge of an arbitrarily drawn downtown commercial district that’s replete with vacant storefronts.

I’ve been covering this pretty regularly, because it’s a textbook example of what goes wrong when a network of good ole boys and girls run a town for the benefit of their buddies.

In this case, the council has bent over backward to accommodate the wishes of a prominent local businessman, electrical contractor Kevin Davis, who is a former City Council member and owns property down the block from the church; and Jeni Jones, a member of the planning and zoning board who owns two properties on the street.

The third name on the protest petition blocking the permit is Davis’ business partner, former council member Ryan Christie. He voted against Tobe and Rousseau last year in their first attempt at getting a permit, although he obviously should have recused himself due to conflict of interest.

Silver lining: Christie got bounced off the council in last November’s election, in favor of a write-in candidate.

I can’t wait to see these council members have to testify, under oath, why they decided this case the way they did.

The smartest thing they could do would be to reverse course and approve the permit pronto, before they have to raise their right hand in a witness chair.

But by all indications, they’re too stubborn to do that.

Their latest stall tactic may have bought themselves another month, but the day of reckoning is coming.