For a month the city and the county have been volleying a new interlocal agreement for the future development of County Road 1.

And after Leavenworth County Commissioners discussed the city’s latest agreement amendments, the ball is once again in Tonganoxie’s court to decide its fate on County Road 1.

For weeks, the two government entities have been going back and forth on a few key issues. A main issue is the selection of a development consultant to plan the growth in that area.

As the Dec. 31 deadline on a moratorium on building in the area neared, county officials began the process of developing a plan to manage development of that area.

By getting ideas from Tonganoxie planners and the public, the Leavenworth County Planning Commission came up with a special development district for the corridor. This development district would be the county’s guide to managed development in the area without having a formal land use plan. This became a point of contention between the city and some of the residents who would be affected by the planned district because they wanted a company with planning and marketing knowledge to be the ones in charge of the corridor’s future, not the planning commission.

To that end, in the city’s last round of changes the city included a deadline of Dec. 31, 2011 to select a development consultant to create the land use plan or else void the interlocal agreement.

Jason Ward, Tonganoxie city council president, said in a Dec. 21 work session that focused on the interlocal agreement, that the only proper way to manage the growth in that area and to develop the appropriate development fees in that area was to get a land use plan from development experts and not from the county.

On Thursday, the commissioners discussed the proposed deadline and found it to be unacceptable.

“Right now we are all as nervous as cats in a room full of rocking chairs with regards to next year’s budget,” Commissioner J.C. Tellefson said. “To put anything on us that we have to do an expenditure next year or even the following year I think it is folly.”

In the original interlocal agreement signed by the two parties in March, a deadline of April 23 was set to select a development consultant. The commissioners were considering a bid from Red Development that would have created the land use plan, but the $150,000 price tag was too much for some of the commissioners.

When that deadline passed, city leaders decided to withhold their first payment of $100,000 of a total $1.5 million to the county for the project.

Tellefson said that he was in favor of getting a development consultant, but just didn’t want to have his hands tied on a specific date.

For now the county will finalize other changes to this draft of the interlocal agreement before sending it back to Tonganoxie.

While the moratorium for construction has been lifted for most of the corridor, the moratorium has been extended until the end of March for the area that may be controlled by Tonganoxie.