Mayor wants steady

progress with city growth

 

By Robert Stevens

Managing editor

Jan. 11, 2018

 

FAIRVIEW—David Taylor of Fairview wears multiple hats for his city, and following the 2017 municipal election, now has added a mayor’s hat to his collection.

Hired as Fairview city planner in 2007 by then Mayor Spencer Cox, Taylor has worked full-time under three different mayors and a dozen or so council members to keep the city running smoothly.

When asked how that experience has prepared him to be mayor, Taylor says it has given him experience “listening to the citizens and discovering what they want for the city.”

“Times have changed” for Fairview, he says. “The hard part of it is that there are those who really don’t want Fairview to change, but we have young families moving back to their ancestral home of Fairview, and now we have to grow. Finding a balance there isn’t easy, because it’s hard to keep both sides happy.”

But Taylor says he will do his best.

Besides his decade plus of experience, Taylor will be giving residents a tangible financial benefit by serving as mayor.

Part of platform was that he would officially retire from his paid position of city planner but  carry on with the same duties in addition to his mayoral duties. That will add approximately $48,000 to the general fund.

He says the money that formerly went for his salary can go to other things, such as infrastructure to support growth.                  Taylor says he doesn’t want Fairview to be without a city planner permanently.  By the time his term (or terms) as mayor are complete, he wants the city to be able to afford a qualified planner full-time once more.

“The Fairview you see today is not what it’s going to be like in four years.” Taylor says. “Some people are going to take that the wrong way, but it’s just reality. We have to grow to make ends meet.”

In particular, the city needs to bring in new business.

And growth is happening, Taylor says, especially along the city outskirts and into its buffer zone, areas where Fairview provides various services.

“It’s bustling along Milburn Road, and other places around the Fairview perimeter,” Taylor says. “When I was running for mayor, I had as many supporters out on the edge of town, even across the (Utah) county line, as I did in the heart of Fairview. I like to think that that is an indicator that I have done some things right over all these years with the city.”

Taylor says he loves working with the people of Fairview.

“There are good days and bad days,” he says, but Taylor says he sees a lot of good days ahead.

One infrastructure project now underway is development of new switching stations and a new power substation. Those changes will enable Fairview to keep electricity flowing even when Mt. Pleasant has an outage.

“It’s a cooperative effort between the two communities, and it is expensive, but it gives us the ability to better serve the residents,” he says. “They should be completed by spring. The weather is all that is holding us back.”

On a long term basis, Taylor says city-contracted electrical engineers want to break Fairview into electrical service areas, so if local power outages happen, they can be limited to the area with the problem while power keeps flowing to the rest of the city.

Another forward-looking development will be formation of a Fairview Youth City Council.

Taylor is also welcoming a new police chief, Jeremy Wright, who is replacing retiring former chief Bob Bingham.

Aside from accommodating and to some degree encouraging growth, Taylor says he does not want to make fundamental changes in city government.

“The wheel is not broken,” he says “I just want to see it keep turning.”