PENDLETON — The town board tabled an agenda item involving ATV use on the town’s multi-use trail in favor of forming a committee to study the issue until a later date.
After hearing from a few residents during the meeting’s public comment time, lawmakers, led by Pendleton Councilman David Leible, determined that a decision was not going to be made Monday.
“I’m going to ask board members to take this off the agenda once again. Give us to the end of the year and a few months next year, let’s organize a committee and see what we can do,” Leible said, adding that the committee might be able to fund raise toward ways to enforce the registration law, as well as maintenance.
The idea was quickly validated by residents, at least six who immediately raised hands to be a part of such a committee, including Ryan Lanternier who had said during public-comment that before banning ATVs, the decision should go to the people.
“If we have any issues in the town at all, if we had a public meeting, we could all resolve it. … We shouldn’t just resort to shutting down the trail. It’s been there for so many years, keeps the kids out of trouble,” he said.
Other councilmen also voiced their opinion. Councilman Wolfgang Buechler said the question was how the rules of the trail should be enforced and that he’s in favor to keep residents riding on it.
However, he said that the community needed to come together to answer those questions and obey the local law as it stands now.
“As of the last meeting, 10 households, 10 were actually registered and used the trail,” Buechler said, adding liability was also an issue and had been when ATV use was restricted to residents-only in 2021.
Councilman Scott Lombardo said he was “on the fence” but believed the residents should be “given a little rope” to find out if it was feasible to keep Pendleton’s trail servicing the ATV community.
Councilman Joseph Hickman also agreed that a committee should be set up, but didn’t want to simply postpone a decision.
“I want to see the agenda and the dates of the committee and start seeing input from the community of how this issue is to be monitored,” he said.
Supervisor Joel Maerten, agreed with Hickman, and said that any committee should have input, possibly by September, and report what it had found.
Leible said, that wasn’t a problem and volunteered to head the committee and invited residents to contact him.
“You’ve got liability no matter what you do,” he added. “You had a girl fall and hit her head at the splashpad. She had to go to the hospital.”