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Category: News and Issues (Page 2 of 2)

Fiber for American Fork, Part 2: Anticipated Benefits

This is the second of several planned blog posts about a proposal the American Fork City Council is considering to extend fiber optic connectivity to every residence and business in American Fork as a utility. You can find a more detailed description of the proposal itself in the previous post, where I also explain my head start in knowing about the proposal.

Before we go further, I should interrupt for an apology. I hoped to post this before I left for Lake Tahoe (hence the photo) for a week at the end of July. Now it’s not even August any more, and I’m finally posting it. Sorry about that.

Lake Tahoe

This post explores the expected benefits to residents, businesses, and the City itself, if we build the fiber system. This is one important angle from which to view the proposal. Another will follow in the next post: good and bad reasons for opposing it.

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Fiber for American Fork, Part 1: What’s Proposed

(And Who Am I to Write About It?)

American Fork, Utah, is considering establishing fiber optic service to every residence and business in the city as a public utility, as permitted by Utah Code 10-8-14. Here we’ll discuss the proposal itself, and I’ll tell you how I learned enough to write about it. (Teaser: I got a head start.) Later posts will address specific issues in more detail and attempt to answer related questions.

This proposal will not be a measure on the November ballot, though candidates may make it an issue in the 2019 municipal election. The city council will hold a preliminary vote, probably in mid-August, to put some things in place for a final city council vote in mid-November.

The August vote will not be whether to build the system or not. The November vote is the big one.

In the meantime, several public information meetings will be held — one already has been — to explain the proposal and answer questions (of which more soon).

The Fiber Proposal

Under the proposal, each residence in the city will pay a monthly fee as part of its utility bill. No additional fee will be required for basic service. The numbers in discussions I’ve attended have ranged from about $9.00 per month to about $12.00 per month for each residence. Flyers at the first public information meeting said $9.95 per month, but that’s still tentative.

Each business will also have a monthly fee, again on the City utility bill. The same flyers at the same meeting projected that at $19.95.

The current plan involves no installation or setup fee.

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Clark Taylor Joins American Fork City Council

On January 9 the American Fork City Council appointed Clark Taylor to fill the vacancy Brad Frost left on the council when he was sworn in as mayor the previous week, after winning in the November election. Frost was two years into his second term on the council, so the appointment is for the remaining two years of that four-year term.

Clark Taylor

Utah law provides for the council to fill such a vacancy. The City announced the vacancy in December, took applications until January 5, then heard from each applicant in the January 9 meeting, before choosing Taylor unanimously on the first ballot.

The other applicants were:

  • Jeff Shorter, who lost in the November general election, running as a one-term incumbent;
  • Kyle Barratt, who lost in the November general election;
  • George Brown, who served on the council several terms ago and has since run unsuccessfully for mayor;
  • Ernie John, who lost in the 2017 primary;
  • Bruce Frandsen
  • Amber Marstella
  • Charelle Lyon

If you’d like to examine the applications, they’re publicly available and pages 4-29 of this PDF file, which includes the meeting agenda and the council members’ packet of information for the meeting. They include written responses to several questions. To see the candidates’ statements to the council in their meeting, a long and avoidable discussion of the voting process, and the vote itself, turn to the City’s YouTube channel for video of the meeting. (The agenda, which is at the beginning of the packet at the previous link, will help you navigate the video.)

I don’t know how much back-channel discussion went on among council members in the days prior to the vote, or what additional contact any of them might have had with applicants or with Mayor Frost. (There’s no reason for it not to have occurred, but anything involving at least three of them at a time would have to have been noticed in advance and treated as a public meeting.) I didn’t speak about the process or the vote on the record with any of the council; nor did I speak with the candidates themselves. Nor, for that matter, am I acquainted with all of them. However, I thought the result was predictable.

Clark Taylor has served on the council twice before, as recently as two years ago, and is known to be a workhorse and to work well with others. His name has been tossed about in the past as a strong potential mayoral candidate. Such a congenial, energetic workhorse would have great appeal to the rest of the council and the mayor, coming in the wake of four years during which some members of the council were known to be less than energetic in accepting and fulfilling committee assignments.

So I thought the outcome was predictable, given that Taylor’s name was on the list. And the unanimous first ballot is noteworthy, but — at least for me — no surprise.

All of that said, there were other strong candidates in the field. The tougher the decision, the luckier we are.

So . . . thanks to all who applied, and congratulations to Councilman Taylor.

Mayor Hadfield’s Mission

One of the first people I got to know in American Fork, after my family and I arrived in 1998, was J. H. Hadfield, known in recent years to American Forkers as Mayor Hadfield. He yielded the gavel this week, after two four-year terms, to our new mayor, Brad Frost.

We often say the words “public service” with a wink or an eye-roll, and we look mostly in vain for genuine heroes in our politics. I myself have less than a handful of heroes in national government, but they’re much easier to find at the local level. And sometimes public service really is service.

mayor hadfield

Mayor James H. Hadfield

Before They Were Mayors

J. H. enlisted me to serve as his assistant in a local church leadership assignment before he and I had even met, I think, and we worked together in those roles for the next four years. I quickly discovered, beneath a crusty exterior, a warm and generous heart, a keen and open mind, an eagerness to serve, a skill for delegation, a profound distaste for long meetings and bureaucratic baloney, and a humility one does not always find in seasoned leaders. He didn’t want fanfare; he was more interested in helping people. He had more energy for that than I did, and I am decades younger. I’ve spent most of my adult life in local church leadership, but a disproportionate number of my favorite behind-the-scenes stories have J. H. in them.

A few years later I would meet the first American Fork Mayor I knew before he ran for office, the late Heber Thompson. He and I worked together on a civic project for more than a year. I found him equally eager to serve and possessed of a quiet dignity and intelligence, to say nothing of a taste for French poetry. He ran for office and was elected in 2005. He and I had a few political differences along the way, but under his leadership the City addressed some large and difficult issues intelligently.

Heber was retired. He could have worked a lot less and enjoyed his retirement years more, but he wanted to serve, and he thought he could and should serve. And he didn’t take shortcuts. Before running for mayor he served in one of the busiest and most thankless unelected roles in the City, as a member of the Planning Commission.

J. H. was working in the City Engineer’s office at the time, and I knew he was looking forward to retiring and serving a particular church service mission. Colonel Hadfield (long of the Utah National Guard) wanted an assignment to work with members of the military somewhere. He spoke of this plan repeatedly to me — sometimes over french fries and milkshakes, after we visited one of our flock in a hospital in another city, where his dietary misbehavior was less likely to find its way to Mrs. Hadfield’s ears.

Serving Where Needed

Then came 2009. Mayor Thompson would seek reelection, hoping to serve one more term. Behind the scenes, two of the best people I have ever known, friends for whom J. H. also had great respect, began to twist his arm. They wanted him to run for mayor — my older friend against my newer friend. Somehow they persuaded him to put his dream retirement at risk — he might win — and he filed for office. He turned to me for help with his campaign, which I gladly provided. I thought he stood a good chance of winning, in part because, when I was out and about with him in our church service, everyone in northern Utah County seemed to know him, and he seemed to know everyone.

(Cool tangent: He and Mrs. Hadfield — Elaine — first crossed paths in a Lehi maternity ward, as newborns. By his account, she wouldn’t give him the time of day. Later he would win her favor, obviously, but it wasn’t easy.)

As we strategized in those early days of the campaign, I could see that he was running to win, not just to placate friends who wanted him to run. I knew of his hopes for his retirement years, and I could do the math even before he stated it outright: if he won, his service mission would have to be to the city, not to his beloved fellow soldiers somewhere.

He did win, and he narrowly won reelection in 2009, despite an anti-incumbent frenzy.

Mayor Hadfield’s Mission

In the ethos of church service — not just in the LDS Church — and in the ethos of military service, for that matter, we are sent where we are needed, and we go where we are sent. One of the many things we can learn from J. H. Hadfield and his greatest supporter, Elaine, is that civic service is crucially important too, and some of the best people are needed there. The examples of his predecessor, Mayor Thompson, and his wife, Vicki Thompson, with whom I served on a City committee, offer the same lesson.

colonel-mayor-hadfield

Mayor Hadfield’s second and last term ended this week, but there will be no church service mission now. He has been battling cancer for a while. He and Elaine sacrificed the service they wanted, to serve where they were needed. And if we’re tempted to think that civic service — eight years of it! — is somehow less worthy or a lower calling than a church mission or two or three, their example could instruct us in that too.

Looking back, I see that there is much to honor in eight years of service by an excellent mayor. For one thing, he’s kinda like a superhero of infrastructure, and we needed one. (See a recent Daily Herald article.) But I thought you should know what some of his friends have seen and honored from the beginning.

Thank you, Mayor and Mrs. Hadfield.

American Fork Candidates Q&A, Part 4 – The City and Developers

In this post, candidates respond to one question:

For years we’ve heard reports that developers find the City so difficult to work with that many of them won’t build at all in American Fork. To what extent are these reports true? Is it a good thing? What if anything should elected City officials do about it?

Carlton Bowen and Brad Frost are running for mayor. Kyle BarrattBarbara Christiansen, Staci Carroll, and Jeffrey Shorter are running for two available city council seats.

Note: None of the candidates who were defeated in the primary responded to this set of questions, so this post, unlike previous similar posts, has no responses to hide behind buttons.

  • Published: 25 July 2017
  • Updated: 31 October 2017

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American Fork Candidates Q&A: Part 3 – Quick Responses on Nine Issues

I’m combining mayoral and city council candidates’ responses to this set of questions, because so far only one of the former and two of the latter have responded with answers. I’ll publish more if and when I receive them.

Perhaps I ask too much of candidates, sending them all these questions and asking them to respond. Life is busy enough, and campaigning makes it more so, for those who actually do it.

However, I keep thinking that it’s a decent test — not a perfect one — of candidates’ inclination and ability to communicate, even when they’re busy — which seems to be an important characteristic of their service, if we elect them.

But onward. In this set of questions, I asked the candidates to respond quickly — in seven words or less — to a list of issues. My exact instructions were (with examples omitted): Respond to the following issues in seven words or less. . . . Leave some of them blank, if you wish.

Those who responded caught the spirit of it. Please note that I don’t expect informed profundity on every issue; you probably shouldn’t either. But it’s good to see how they think. Continue reading

Mayor Hadfield on Police and Fire

I sent two more questions to American Fork Mayor James H. Hadfield; here they are, with his responses.

Q. Does the City have enough police officers and police stations? If not, how many more do we need? At what cost? Are there plans in place to fund them?

A. The Police Station is presently adequate. However, the Department has asked for five new officers in this budget year. The Council has approved money for only two officers. As the City grows we will certainly need to budget for more officers to guarantee the safety of our residents in the years to come.

Q. Does the City need another fire station or two? Where, why, and at what cost? Are there plans in place to fund this growth?

We need a second fire station. We are presently looking at property to lease from the Utah Developmental Center. We have money in the budget to do the architecture work. This new station will greatly benefit the north end of our community, especially improving response time to the Mt. Timpanogos LDS Temple and the American Fork Hospital.

Thank again, Mayor Hadfield.

For more discussion of issues, see my previous Q and A with Mayor Hadfield and most of the city council.

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