It was the first 10 minutes of the Eagle City Council meeting, and audience members were already grimacing. Black flies swirled around Steve Booth’s backyard in a video on the monitor as he spoke from the podium. “What we have is a pretty unhealthy situation,” Booth told the council, “for us and for the animals.”
Booth was the first of seven speakers to raise concerns about a plot of agricultural land adjacent to the Crossley Park subdivision, where most of them live, just across Highway 55 north of Eagle Island State Park. The land is an overcrowded cattle pasture in a wispy meadow on West Flint Drive with a house, a barn and a corral.
“It’s a dustbowl in the summer and a mudhole in the winter,” said another speaker, Donna Gerber, at the March 24 meeting. She and her neighbors had “hoped to resolve this issue one neighbor to another,” Gerber said, but things had gotten out of hand…