By TONYA SMITH
It’s been a hard week for American Fork.
Last Friday, Mayor Jess Green fired the City Police Chief John Durrant and seven other police officers, citing “insubordination” as the cause, according to the Associated Press.
The police chief and officers were reinstated into office hours later by an emergency meeting of the City Council. It is unclear what the next step is for the city. The police chief and officers are back at work for now, according to Kevin Bennett, civil attorney for the city.
“I can’t serve two masters, and yet I’ve got two masters that are going in diametrically different directions,” Bennett said. “One is saying, ‘I have the authority to do this, I don’t need council approval,'” citing the statute that’s stating he’s the executive head.
“And I have the city council pointing to state law and appointments on terminations under city code, saying (the right procedure involves) the mayor with consent of the council. That’s the fight…and … it’s been very hard for me.”
“With a population between 800 and 60,000 people, American Fork is a third class city and can only have one branch of government,” Bennett said.
“That’s part of the problem, frankly, is that we’re a third-class city and things are bottled up in a third-class city, with the statues,” he said.
“You don’t have two separate branches of government like you do down in Provo. You have one governing body made up of the mayor and five council members and the governing body does certain things, and yet the mayor has certain select additional powers. There’s a question of how far (the mayor’s powers) can go without the council. It gets muddy in a third class city or town because they don’t really don’t make good provisions for it in the law. I don’t know how far it’s going to go.”
According to an AP report released Wednesday afternoon, an attorney for Durrant, Kathryn Collard, is planning to seek a temporary restraining order to keep the mayor from firing Durrant again. “It has just become intolerable,” she told the Associated Press.
Bennett, who was present at the council meeting Tuesday said, “For the regular city council meeting, it was okay until the end. There were a number of families of police officers and a lot of citizens there that raised major concerns until close to midnight. They were asking, ‘Can’t somebody please tell us what’s going on, when can we get some peace around here?’ and that’s where it’s at.”
“All last night I kept dreaming that I had people coming up to me saying, ‘Please, if you can’t tell us (what’s going to happen), who can?.’ I’ve been hearing this dozens of times a day since Friday. It’s so much that I’ve had the worst night of my twelve years as an attorney last night.”
City Planner Rod Despain said that things have been a little tougher than usual for the city staff as well. “From the staff’s perspective, it has made life difficult for the rank and file employees of the town,” he said. “No question about it, it’s the source of frequent conversations, almost pervading everything else and while the city is not quite in gridlock, it certainly isn’t going as fast as it could.”
“There is no one source for all the problems,” he said, “How does one lay blame, and where does it lay? Everyone has their own spin as to where the blame could lay, and there are so many diverse players in this thing that it’s really hard to say this is the problem and everybody else is … pure. It just isn’t in it.”
The mayor announced at the meeting Tuesday that the city would be pursuing counsel with the attorney general’s office, according to Bennett.
“I don’t know if that’s going to pan out,” Bennett said. “Typically (the attorney general) refers right back to the attorney. I think what they’ve got here is a situation where they probably need independent counsel. Maybe a judicial action. But it’s almost moot because we’re at the end of the term. If they’re pursuing anything like that, I don’t know where it’s going to go.”
Despain summed the situation up when he said “I don’t know if there is anybody that perceives it clearly and is involved. You’ve got to be in the middle of the mud to understand where it’s coming from.”
