Tuesday night the Junction City Commission failed to rescind their May 20th vote that directed city staff not to move forward with the next needed step for annexation. Rescinding that vote would be needed in order to discuss the topic of annexation further.

The topic was brought up again Wednesday night during the Commissions budget work session.

Commissioner Pat Landes wanted to apologize for his comments during Tuesday nights meeting and said that he has been working on and off for the past two years on the topic of annexation for a few reasons.

“I think we do have a fairness issue, I already covered that and I’m not going to cover that again. I have several friends along Spring Valley Road that have never received services that they were promised,” Landes said.

“So one of my goals was to work towards being able to provide those services that were promised several years ago and were never delivered. So to do that we needed that document. I felt like people were let down. I felt the way that it was handled from six weeks ago to now was horrible.”

Commissioner Jim Sands explained that the way things were explained Tuesday night was confusing.

“There was two things going on, they said rescind, I thought we were talking about the motion before. We talk so quick, and we talk so much, and we beat so much crap down, when that motion came across to talk about annexation I did not vote. Because I wasn’t sure which way the dag on vote was going to go,” Sands said.

He did say that there is concern about annexation and that he wants to do it but he wants to do it the right way.

Commissioner Cecil Aska was also confused and said that the confusion leads back to the May 20th conversation and that the whole thing has been presented to the commission poorly.

“We talked about doing clusters and then all of the sudden were just going to move forward, and to be honest I’ve been irritated from the very start. I think that you guys have  not done a good job of putting this whole thing together, and I will put part of that on zoning and planning, but it just has not been laid out right,” Aska said.

The idea of a work session to discuss the whole matter has been thrown around a couple of times by the commission and Cheryl Beatty, Interim City Manager explained that a work session probably is the best next step.

“So that we can educate the two new commissioners because they didn’t have the chance of being through the workshop that we all had.  This time we have better maps and a better delineation of what it means, but really we can’t go much forward until we have that report,” Beatty said.

A work session was not scheduled Wednesday night and the commission did not take any formal action on the issue.