Judge lets county fix property description in Ironwood case

A district judge has granted Montezuma County and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment permission to correct the property description in a court order at the center of their long-running case over a pile of wood waste between Cortez and Dolores, KSJD reported Friday.

The public radio station reported that District Judge William Furse granted the motion filed by the county commissioners and the state health department, who are the plaintiffs in the civil case. The defendant is Ironwood Group LLC, which owns a mill on Road T. The company’s owner and one of its managers are also named as defendants; this site is not naming them.

According to KSJD, the defendants agreed to clear the wood waste by the end of February 2023 and did not, and an amended stipulated injunction pushed that deadline back by a few months. The plaintiffs say the pile is still there and have asked the court to hold the company in contempt.

At a lengthy hearing on September 22, KSJD reported, the defense argued the case should be thrown out because the Ironwood property is made up of two adjoining parcels — only one of which holds the wood pile — and the injunction named the wrong one. The plaintiffs asked instead to correct the address, and that is the motion the judge granted.

County Attorney Stephen Tarnowski told commissioners on September 29 that he and a commissioner had spent several hours in court the previous week on the case, and that the judge had asked both sides to file proposed orders rather than ruling from the bench. On October 6 he told the board the county had filed its proposed order and the court had not yet ruled, with a status conference set for Monday and a hearing still to come on the contempt motion.

Read the earlier reports in our coverage of the September 29 commissioners meeting and the October 6 meeting. KSJD’s report is here.