April 7, 2025, Camden County Commission meeting at 10:00 a.m.

I attended the April 7, 2025, Camden County Commission meeting at 10:00 a.m.

All commissioners were present.

This was a Monday meeting because the Commission meets on the first Monday of each quarter to discuss petitions to vacate county roads.

The first agenda item was for Indian Park Lane.

The petitioner was Dave Merwin.

Merwin wasn’t present at the meeting, but the commissioners explained that they publicly read the road petition on the first meeting so there didn’t need to be much discussion. They would vote on the road petition at the next road meeting in three months.

Commissioner Gohagan looked over the road petition paperwork and observed that it needed a legal description with a surveyors’s stamp on it.

Hopefully Dave Merwin reads this.

This item was tabled until the next quarterly meeting.

The second agenda item was for Lot 1 of Moran Estates.

The petitioner was Vanessa Moran. She had publicly posted laminated copies of the road vacation in three places. Nobody else owns the land that borders the road right of way that she wishes to vacate.

This agenda item was also tabled until the next quarterly meeting when the Commission will vote on the matter.

And that was that.

RSMo 228.110 regulates how roads may be vacated. Like many Missouri statutes, the statute language is easy to read, but not always clear in its meaning. This is by design. Missouri’s founding fathers wanted to make sure Missourians had plenty of things to chat about.

According to the statute, any twelve residents of a township may apply for the vacation of a road that runs through their township. This might happen because they consider the road useless and the repair of the road an “unreasonable burden upon the district…”

The petition shall be read publicly on the first day of the term and then the matter should be continued without further proceedings until the next term.

The petitioners would then post the petition in not less than 3 public places in the township(s) twenty days before the first day of the next [quarterly] term.

A copy of the petition shall be personally served on everyone residing in the district whose lands are crossed or touched by the road proposed to be vacated.

On the first day of the next term, the petition will again be publicly read.

If twelve other residents of the township don’t file a remonstrance (a protest), the Commission may then vacate the road at the cost of the petitioners.

If the twelve residents of the township DO file a remonstrance, it appears that it is up to the Commission to make a decision, followed by some truly Byzantine legal language to determine who pays for the costs of the road.

I also assume that the 12 township residents who want to vacate the road need to be a different 12 township residents from the ones who were against vacating it. You might tell me that’s a silly distinction to make, but this is Hooterville, so nothing can ever surprise me. Some people will sign anything if only to avoid a fuss.

This requirement for twelve township residents is pretty interesting when you consider that half of the county probably doesn’t know what a township is and probably half of the people who do know what it is couldn’t tell you which township they live in.

If you took a poll in Lil Rizzo’s on a Friday night and asked folks what township they lived in, your top 3 guesses would probably be:

“Four Seasons”

“Horseshoe Bend”

“Another Old-Fashioned, please”

The correct answer is “Pawhuska”, but to be neighborly, we would also accept #3.

Townships form an important part of local county government. The Planning and Zoning Commission and the political Central Committees are all structured based on township membership. This ensures that no single portion of the county can dominate a committee simply because they have more free time and don’t have a blog to write. The county’s eleven townships are:

If you can think of other aspects of county politics that are impacted by our townships, I welcome you to add them in the Comments.

Now you are all ready for your next cocktail party conversation. Impress and amaze your friends with your grasp of the county’s township system. They will be fascinated. Just ask my wife. When I talk about this stuff, her eyes immediately glaze over with complete and total fascination.