‘Abandoned’ label irks hamlets’ residents
SEDALIA: The town along U.S. 85 features the popular store, Sisters, above, and the Sedalia Grill, below, with its American flag mural. By Ken Papaleo/Rocky Mountain News
Two girls walk into a shop for strawberry and chocolate ice cream, and Ronda Dudeck rings them up.
Scissors snap as a pair of women sit in front of mirrors and get their hair cut at a salon.
Men drink beer at a noisy bar.
There’s no shortage of activity in Sedalia on a recent afternoon. And yet the town is said to be “not currently existing” in a June 18 letter written by Douglas County authorities.
Dudeck,like most other Sedalia residents, wasn’t aware that her community made the list of small burgs that the county wants Secretary of State Mike Coffman to declare abandoned.
“Abandoned? Why? Why the little town of Sedalia?” Dudeck asked in disbelief.
The reason? Sedalia, which is in unincorporated Douglas County,has not held an election in five years, which under state law gives the county the right to ask that it be ruled abandoned.
The county is doing so to squelch any sequel to efforts by Franktown residents,who want to incorporate their 1-square mile village along historic boundaries. The county doesn’t share Franktown’s view of its history.
Some of the towns included in the letter genuinely don’t exist any more. Lehigh, for one, is now private property.
Others, like Sedalia and Louviers, can offer proof of their existence — post offices, for example. In Deckers, however, there’s only a line of stores next to the South Platte River on Colorado 67.
“Deckers is probably not big enough to have a city council, but it sure isn’t abandoned,” said Brett Hooper, 46, owner of the convenience store.
“The point is, whatever Deckers we’re talking about, there’s been no municipal action of any kind for at least five years,” said Assistant County Attorney Ron Clark.
Sedalia has not had an election recently, but resident Steve Tietjen jokes that it still has authorities.
“We got a lot of pretend mayors,” said Tietjen, 61, as he sat on a stool at Bud’s Bar, a Sedalia attraction well known to outsiders. “The current pretend mayor is Donnie Johnson. He lives over there,” he said, pointing west.
Clark admits there are signs of life in some of these so-called abandoned towns. “There’s flesh and blood over there, yes,” he said.
FRANKTOWN SPURRED LETTER
Douglas County’s get-tough letter was sent to Coffmanin the wake of an attempt by 15 residents in the Franktown area to incorporate.
The residents claim their proposed 1-square-mile incorporation marks the town’s original boundaries, back when it was declared the temporary county seat in 1870.
Then, the town was known as Frankstown, with an S.
The residents want to reincorporate using a statute for towns that existed before 1877, which means they don’t have to meet the 150-person threshold set by the legislature to incorporate under current law, said Jack Hilbert, a Douglas County commissioner.
The idea behind Douglas County’s letter, which includes “Frankstown,” is to prevent a handful of people in areas once considered towns from obtaining eminent domain and annexation powers, Hilbert said.
Once the towns on the list are declared abandoned, none of them could incorporate using the Frankstown model.
“We need them to follow current law, not law from 125 years ago, when we were trading beaver pelts,” Hilbert said.
In Louviers, a community of about 100 houses west of U.S. 85 on Airport Road, the reaction to the letter was the same as in Sedalia — disbelief.
“Previously but not currently existing?” Margaret Nordberg said incredulously, reading an excerpt from the letter. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“We’re all on the map,” she continued, reading through the list of towns on the letter. “We all have signs to our towns made by Douglas County.”
LETTER CAME AS A SURPRISE
None of the residents of this town with tall trees towering over houses knew they were on the county’s abandoned list before last week.
“I don’t know what to tell you. It has surprised me,” said Jeanne Henderson, the town’s postmaster for the past 15 years.
Henderson and Nordberg said a town meeting is needed to talk about the letter. Hilbert said “no dots go off the map” if a place is considered abandoned, and “no names disappear from the post office.”
The only thing that changes is the way they could incorporate, he said.
For now, Sedalia has been granted a reprieve from the June 18 abandonment list, said Hilbert, who met with residents last week.
It seems that folks here also are talking about incorporation, and they may have enough residents to meet the modern standard, he said.
Jonathan Tee, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, said the county’s letter is being discussed with the attorney general’s office. Tee said there would be public hearings for the locales involved before any action is taken.
“There’s a lot of longtime residents of Sedalia that would hate to know that their town’s been considered abandoned,” saidSuzanne Lusk, 36, a hairstylist at the Sedalia Hair Station.
“We have the Fourth of July parade every year,” Lusk said. “The best fireworks in all of Colorado, I think,” said Cherri Jacobson, 45, another stylist at the salon. During the parade, firefighters soak the people on the street with hoses, they said. “Oh yeah, it’s a hoot.”
