by Theodore Wiesehan

    At its Feb. 6 meeting the Cordova Village Board decided it would no longer pursue secession from Seward County.
     "It is a journey that this town board cannot continue any longer," Cordova Mayor Delayne Eberspacher read from a prepared closing statement. "Where this goes from here is not up to us anymore."
     The board cannot continue the process any longer because its members would face criminal charges if it did.
     Attorney Gregory Damman, of Blevens & Damman Law Office, Seward, presented the board with his research on the 1879 Nebraska statutes regarding transfer of land from one county to another.
     While he cleared up the steps a move to York County would require, Damman warned the board that Nebraska law prohibits spending public funds on political issues. Because such a transfer of property must appear on the ballots of both counties involved, a secession would qualify as a political issue.
     "The penalty for violating that statute is a class three misdemeanor," Damman said. "(The secession) option exists not for the board itself but for the citizens - the voters in the territory."
     Any effort to move territory to another county would have to be organized, paid for and carried out by private citizens, he said.
     Such a move would likely require a major community effort in terms of time and dollars.
     First, Damman said, the group pursuing the move would need a precise description of the territory to be moved. This would probably require a survey.
     Then signatures would be needed from majority of registered voters residing in said territory.
     After presenting the signatures to both the York and Seward county boards, both counties would be bound to put the question to voters in both counties in the next general election.
     The transfer would require the approval of a majority of voters in both York and Seward counties.
     Special Projects Director for the Cordova Road Angela Peterson said she did not plan to pursue the issue without public funding and was unaware of any effort at organization in Cordova to continue the process.
     "Money is tight for all of the private citizens in the area and I don't think that we could get a group together to be able to fund something like this," she said in a telephone interview. "Where we've left it is we've tried as a community to proceed and we've realized as a community that we'll have to stop the secession question.
     "That doesn't mean we're giving up on the project. We're going to keep writing to the state senators and our federal representatives and ask to remember us. We're going to continue to ask the commissioners to keep the project their first priority and hope that they can look into other types of funding sources if they can."
     Peterson said that she and the board members were surprised by the media frenzy that their exploration of secession generated. She reiterated that the community harbored no ill will to the county board.
     "We've never had anything against the Seward County Commissioners and we've never had anything against Seward," Peterson said. "It's not that we don't see the goodness in what people have done for us up to this point in time. I have glowing comments about (Seward County Road Superintendent) Russ Daehling. We appreciate him and his consistency and dedication to this project.
     "We just want to make sure the project gets paved."