Hold your horses

After a two week postponement, Melissa Heatherington Mower met with the Creston City Council to ask it to allow her to keep two horses on her property on the southern edge of Creston.

Mower’s property is within the city limits of Creston but is bordered on two sides by agricultural land.

Neighbors Eric Anderson, who lives to the south of Mower, and Bruce Baker, who owns property to the east, renewed their objections to Mower’s horses during the public forum at the beginning of Tuesday’s regular city council meeting. Anderson and Baker had appeared at the Jan. 22 meeting in anticipation of Mower’s request to the city. According to a letter from Mower, she needed to postpone her appearance due to the illness of one of her references.

Anderson and Baker spoke of the smell and flies attracted by having horses in a small area and the lack of adequate fencing. Anderson said he would not have bought his home if he had known there would be horses next door. See the Jan. 23 edition of the CNA for a full account of the neighbors’ complaints.

Other attendees spoke in favor of allowing Mower to keep her horses on her property.

Katy Wiley said she lives on the opposite side of town on the outskirts of Creston near Todd Jackson, who has horses on his property in the city limits. Jackson was present but did not speak.

“I do not smell his horses, the distance that he, Mr. Anderson, lives from Melissa is about the same (as the distance from Wiley’s home to Jackson’s horses),” Wiley said. “You can smell the sale barn worse than you can smell the horses.”

Mower asked the council to give her an extension to allow time to complete a bridge to allow access to more of her land, proper fencing to contain the horses and a drainage system to control runoff onto Anderson’s property.

She stated that she bought her property in 2011 before the ordinance was put into place with the intention of having horses on the land. Mower has been making improvements to the house and property but was not able to complete the process before finances necessitated her moving her horses to the property.

“It was sheer desperation that I brought them onto my property,” Mower said.

Amber Neisemeier told the council that these horse have helped Mower and her daughter grow and learn.

“She’s learning so much about the horses, but also about herself,” Neisemeier said. “This isn’t ‘I want this pretty little thing in my back yard.’ These horses serve a purpose for them.”

Mower said the horses are used for her daughter’s 4-H project and as therapy for her. She said she has been diagnosed with PTSD due to her former position as a Creston police officer for 10 years.

A motion

A motion by council member Rich Madison to require Mower to remove the horses within 14 days died for lack of a second.

Council member Jocelyn Blazek suggested that Mower find other accommodation for the animals while she is working on upgrading her property and then she could come back to the council to show that she meets the requirements for a nonconforming use.

Blazek also explained that the horses were not grandfathered in simply because Mower purchased the property before the ordinance was enacted and that the other owners of horses within city limits had been required to comply with the ordinance.

"They are grandfathered in because they had horses and the met the requirements,” Blazek said.

Blazek then read aloud the requirements, which include adequate space, proper fencing and keeping the area clean, sanitary and free of offensive odors.

Members of the council and Mayor Gabe Carroll expressed their concern that Mower did not meet the requirements of the ordinance before requesting a variance.

“It’s clear that you have a detailed plan for your property,” Blazek said. “My only concern is that the ordinance is clear that those things need to be in place prior to having livestock.”

“Why have you not addressed the issue of the fences before now?” asked council member Matt Levine.

Mower said she has had one of the horses in the city limits for four years with no complaints. She said she still has not received notice of a formal complaint from the city and first learned of the issue from her brother who heard a conversation involving Baker in a local store. In addition she said that she had not come to the city council previously due to her discomfort in returning to the chambers where had a bad experience speaking to the council.

“The last time I had to speak here was regarding police matters to retain my pay. Mr. Wintermute called me screaming saying I would lose my job in three months and that I would be fired,” Mower said. “So it’s very intimidating to me.”

Council member Terry Freeman responded to Mower’s assertion that the council had just allowed a donkey in city limits as a therapy animal, saying that he has personally driven by that area and that he could not even tell that a mini donkey was living there. He also stated that there were no objections by the neighbors to presence of that animal.

‘We have to take it case by case,” Higgins said. “The donkey thing, no neighbors complained about that one. If they had, I probably would have said no.”

Mower also argued that the problems with the neighbors did not begin with the horses. She said the problem stems from the fact that she refused to sign over her interest in a shared sewer system to Anderson.

According to Mower, Anderson had previously expressed interest in purchasing her property, but when she offered to sell it to him now so that she could move her horses elsewhere, he laughed and called her “dirty” and said her house is “nothing but a windbreak.”

“That’s my last ditch option,” Mower said. “If I have to move to be with my animal who I feel had a large impact in saving my life, I will move.”

Tabled

Blazek moved to table the discussion until the Feb. 18 council meeting to allow Mower time to talk to her neighbors and find out what will satisfy them. The motion passed 4 to 2 with Madison and Terry Freeman voting no and Blazek, Levine, Davis and Higgins voting yes. Brenda Lyell-Keate was not present.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Mower’s address has been redacted due to her prior service as a police officer.)