Mayor’s brother sues borough

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough mayor’s brother has carried his fight against road service taxes to Superior Court, filing on his own behalf a lawsuit against the borough.

According to documents filed Feb. 14, Ray DeVilbiss, brother of borough mayor Larry DeVilbiss, alleges the road service taxes amount to a “serious injustice” that has caused damage to himself and his family.

“The defendant has knowingly, with malice, thwarted the will of the Legislature and by so doing created what Frederic Bastiat labeled a ‘plundered class’ of citizens of which I am a member,” Ray DeVilbiss wrote in his pleadings.

The fight over the taxes comes down to one of access. Ray DeVilbiss accesses his Lazy Mountain home via a state road. Borough road service taxes go to pay for maintenance, construction and upkeep of borough roads. DeVilbiss said there is a state law that allows the borough to exclude him from Road Service Area taxes. But the Mat-Su Borough Assembly refuses to let him out.

“I do not use one foot of those RSA-maintained roads to access my parcels or my home on my parcels,” DeVilbiss wrote in his pleadings.

Most recently, the assembly refused on May 3, 2011, to let DeVilbiss — and a cadre of his neighbors who had joined the fight — secede from their road service area. Borough Attorney Nick Spiropoulos told the assembly at the time that whether to allow homeowners to leave service areas was a decision within the borough assembly’s purview.

Members who voted to disallow the secession seemed mostly concerned about the implications such an action would have, fretting over childless homeowners petitioning not to pay education taxes and people trying to secede from fire service areas.

Assemblyman Jim Colver noted at the time that there isn’t a process in place for adding homeowners back into a service area. And some of those state roads will likely become borough roads in the future.

The petition to secede failed 6-1 with Assemblyman Ron Arvin casting the only dissenting vote, saying that he saw the taxation as unfair and his job was to protect residents from injustice.

“I have been before the assembly twice with this matter. That avenue of remedy has been exhausted,” DeVilbiss wrote in his pleading.

In an interview in May 2011, DeVilbiss said that the taxes had bothered him for years but didn’t rise to the level of something he wanted to pick a fight over until his tax bill recently climbed from around $50 to more than $1,000.

DeVilbiss’ pleadings include copies of his tax bills from the last couple years. Notes in the margin of his 2011 bill list the total for taxes on DeVilbiss’ three parcels at $1,461.81.

His lawsuit asks the court to order his parcels be exempted from the taxes and that anything he’s been taxed be credited to his property tax account. He also wants the borough to be ordered to pass a law establishing a secession process.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.