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Show C Y M C K Y A4 Sanpete Messenger-Sanpete Messenger/Gunnison Valley Edition M K Wednesday, July 15, 2009 Sterling (Continued from PB) recent ISO report showed that Sterling did not have a fire department. The last ISO report was made about a decade ago. Sterling got its fire department shortly afterward, but the necessary paperwork was never done that would have changed the ISO rating accordingly. In January 2008, Conover said he would check on the ISO rating. As of last month, not much had been done. In the meantime, many residents had been paying nearly double what they should for homeowner’s insurance because of the rating discrepancy. In an email sent on June 19 of this year to town council members, town recorder Michelle Rasmussen reported a phone call she received from Mike Llewyllen of Worthington-Leavitt Insurance Company. “Mr. Llewyllen has been bombarded with phone calls from customers in Sterling wanting to know why they are paying so much,” Rasmussen’s email read. Llewyllen said, according to Rasmussen, it wasn’t “all that complicated” to make the change and “indicated it was a disservice to the people of our town that we were not following through.” Myrna Peterson was one resident who felt disserved. She began asking about the ISO rating in Sept. 2008. At a town council meeting the following month, she said she had left several weeks of phone messages to Chief Conover before he “finally returned her phone call.” He told her he had given information to the town council. “Unfortunately, the town council has never been given the information,” the meeting’s minutes state. Last February or March, the town provided Conover with certain maps necessary for the ISO but as of April had received no update. The council requested his presence at May’s council meeting. He did not respond. Nor did he pick up a letter sent by the town by certified mail, though there was indication he had retrieved other mail, said Rasmussen. The certified letter, she said, wasn’t picked up until after the meeting had already occurred. It was indicative of what the core problem was, Rasmussen said. “It’s communication,” she said. “They just do what they do and don’t tell anybody what they’re doing. There’s been some issues with not wanting to talk to the council. It’s kind of hard to do business with someone that doesn’t want to talk to you.” When Conover didn’t show up to the meeting, the council decided to fire him. But now some town council members think that decision was based on wrong ideas they were led to believe. “There was some misinformation divulged in the executive meeting that we held,” Councilman Devin Blood said last week. “I feel we were misled.” He didn’t say who had done the misleading, but there were only two other people at the meeting, Councilman Randall Cox and Mayor Garry Bringhurst, and it was Cox who found out that some of the information Bringhurst had presented was incorrect. That leaves Bringhurst, who reported on recommendations made by the town attorney Kay McIff and also David Church, attorney for the Utah League of Cities and Towns. Bringhurst apparently gave the impression during the closed meeting that the legal advice from both lawyers was to fire the chief. But Cox contacted the men and found out that wasn’t quite what they said. Bringhurst acknowledged the incorrect information aspect this week, at the same denying that he intentionally misrepresented the attorneys’ advice. “They didn’t flat out tell me to fire him, no, but they told me the process to go through to remove him,” he said. “I did not try to tip anybody to one side or the other.” But it’s clear Bringhurst was fed up. “I had to address the issue, so I tried to get a hold of Kevin [Conover]. He refused to talk to me. Every time we turned around, it was a refusal,” he said. When Conover failed to show up for the meeting with the council, it was the last straw. “I didn’t want to let him go. None of us did. I wanted to talk to him. But when he refused to show up and did not give us any information on what we needed, we needed to take steps to protect the town,” Bringhurst said. “We came to the consensus that there had to be a change made. What else do we do?” But now, since the decision to let Conover go was based on a misunderstanding of legal advice (regardless of whether the misunderstanding was intentional or not), some on the council want to talk about things a little more, Blood said. They want to know “who had what information and what guidance from whom,” he said. “There are people who want to reconsider the decision.” In fact, Blood said, one council member had wanted to arrange a special council meeting “outside the normal parameters”—perhaps during a time when Mayor Bringhurst would have been unavailable to attend. That idea was scrapped, but the council plans to reconsider the action during a regular meeting to be held this evening. As for the firefighters who quit, Bringhurst said he wishes they would reconsider as well, implying that they owed it to the town. “The Town of Sterling paid for their training, so now they’re going to walk away. They haven’t got the guts enough to stand up and say, ‘Well, that didn’t work, but I’m still a firefighter, and I still live here, and I’m going to protect my town.’” But Conover said that’s his thought exactly. “My biggest concern is for the people of Sterling,” he said last week. If the town had a fire, he said, “I’d go knock the d—n door [of the fire station] down and go be at that fire, and I think the rest of the men would too. But it should never have come to this.” He said there was something more at work in the decision to fire him. “It was way unnecessary, and I feel it was a personal vendetta,” he said. “[Bringhurst] has destroyed a great public service. I think it was just the way he felt about me. He just took everything with it. He’s got a personal problem with me, and I don’t know why.” Conover said that he actually had performed the work for a new ISO rating a couple of years ago. “I’ve done that once, and they [town officials] seem to have lost it.” As for the current ISO situation, Conover said he’d indeed been working on it and that just a mere four days after his termination, he got a call from the ISO folks saying that things were in order to schedule an inspection. Conover said that if anyone stood in the way of the fire department, it was Bringhurst himself. “The mayor even said we weren’t allowed to open a fire hydrant for testing. He said, ‘We cannot, we will not,’” Conover said, adding that the ISO inspectors “want to know how often you exercise those hydrants, what kind of service schedule you have them on.” While he calls the ISO rating issue a “pretty lame excuse” for firing him, he does admit to being reluctant to communicate. “To preserve what we had as long as we did, I definitely stayed as far away from [Bringhurst] as I could,” Conover conceded. “Every time they requested a meeting, it was for some kind of disciplinary action. In a few meetings, I caught him telling stories that were less than truthful just to cover his hind end, and that makes him mad. So I thought it best just to stay away from him, focus on the fire department and start breathing again when we get a new mayor.” He says he hopes the council reconsiders their decision. “It’s up to the council. I think they were led astray,” he said. “I just hope the people of Sterling realize what happened and get us back in line. I don’t feel really good about walking away from something we’ve worked so hard on for the town.” For the time being, Manti City has agreed to lend its fire services to Sterling should the need arise before the town can reorganize its fire department. Fairview Pioneer Day PARADE Friday, July 24, 2009 ATV PARADE 10:30 Kids Parade 10:45 Main Parade 11:00 am Parade begins at 300 North, next to Far West Bank. Line up: turn east on 300 South to 200 East. On 200 East, turn north. Pre-registration form for city, business and family. Floats can also be found on-line at www.fairviewcity.com Entry Name______________________________________________ Type of Entry____________________________________________ Contact person__________________________________________ Address_________________________________________________ City______________________________________________________ Entry Info________________________________________________ Return form to Sean or Shauna Rawlinson, 37 N. 300 E., Fairview, Ut 84629, 435-427-9363 C Y M K C Y M K |