Officials looking at Colorado City land
 
By Jane Zhang
jzhang@thespectrum.com
 
Mohave County officials are negotiating with Colorado City, Ariz., on a land lease to build a justice courthouse near the border of Colorado City and Hildale, Utah.

No official land deal has been made with Colorado City Mayor Dan Barlow, said Pete Byers, who represents the Arizona Strip on the Mohave County Board of Supervisors, the county's governing body. But he said he is looking at a piece of land north of the main road dividing Hildale and Colorado City.

Prompted by a study sponsored by the court system three years ago, Byers said Mohave County has allocated $500,000 in facility's funds, judge's fines and other money Arizona courts collected to build a justice court in Colorado City. Housed in a double-wide trailer in Moccasin, the current courthouse is about 20 miles from Colorado City and 90 miles from Littlefield, Ariz.

"We'll put it (in an area) with good visibility," he said. "It's more accessible to the rest of the county if it's there."

McKay Heaton, presiding judge of the Moccasin Justice Court, would not comment on the proposal to move the court to Colorado City. With eight employees, he said, the court has been in its current location for 10 to 15 years.

Barlow did not return The Spectrum's repeated phone calls Monday to comment on the land deal. With more than 4,000 residents, however, Colorado City is Moccasin Justice Court's biggest precinct. The town, along with Hildale, is dominated by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which still teaches polygamy as a central tenet.

While Byers said moving the justice court from Moccasin to Colorado City has nothing to do with polygamy, anti-polygamy activists said they hope the move will facilitate investigations on what they say are tax evasion, welfare fraud and abuses of women and children in Hildale and Colorado City.

Bob Curran, an anti-polygamy activist with Help the Child Brides in St. George, said he hoped various organizations, including law-enforcement agencies and women and children's services, will eventually open offices in the Colorado City and Hildale area. At an August summit on polygamy in St. George, prosecutors and law-enforcement officers from both Utah and Arizona vowed to work together.

"The only thing we want is nobody from the cult involved there," he said. "There will be fear and intimidation. That will defeat the whole purpose of the whole thing."

If an employee from the FLDS church answers the phone or take notes at a sheriff's substation in Colorado City, Curran said, residents will be deterred from reporting on crimes and abuses.

Instead of working with Barlow on land issues, he said, the Mohave County Board of Supervisors should seek land from private landowners and the Bureau of Land Management. David Boyd, a BLM spokesman, said the bureau can legally lease land to government agencies through certain procedures.

Law-enforcement agencies in Arizona and Utah said they plan to use the future courthouse to open substations in the area. But Mohave County's $500,000 budget, Byers said, will only fund the justice courthouse. If the Mohave County Sheriff's Office uses the facility, he said, they will have to pay part of the cost.

The Washington County Sheriff's Office has thought about opening a substation in Hildale, Sheriff Kirk Smith said, but the plan is still in "a talking phase."

"It'll be several months away before anything happens," he said. "It's going to happen."

Within the next year, Mohave County Attorney William J. Ekstrom, Jr. said he hopes to open an office in Colorado City, which will include services to youth and victims of assault and domestic violence.

"We'll have a prosecutor there, which I think is important," Ekstrom said. "That'll kind of remove the appearance (that) things are happening (but) are quashed locally.
 
TheSpectrum.com
Originally published Tuesday, September 16, 2003
 
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