My response to Hailey's Fire Chief, regarding his timely response:

Hi Mike,

Thank you so much for your speedy and comprehensive responses to my concerns. I am impressed with your answers.

This morning, when I pulled our freight truck past the main hydrant of concern, I was relieved to notice that the utility locations were recently marked out, presumably for repair.

I was curious too, as to whether the person that damaged the hydrant had been contacted and if so, what the result of that contact was.

Again, thank you explaining to me some of the variables and inner workings about which I was unaware. I didn’t want to come off sounding like too much of a grump, but after reading about the recent animal center fire, I felt compelled to follow up. I suppose that my using the term ‘disharmonic occurrences’ may have sounded a bit over the top, so to explain more, I will elaborate on an earlier bad experience of mine with the City. A few years ago, the Hailey water-billing department somehow lost my deposit. This required me to go to the bank, to prove that I had made it. After that, there were some other mistakes on my bill, which I pointed out to the city, but then the whole set of circumstances started to become very draining.

I had some more questions for the head of the Water Department, Mr. Ray Hyde. However, when I started asking them, I began receiving half-effort answers - if anything at all. When I told one of my bosses about this, she mentioned that the City of Hailey had been charging her for water for over a decade, when it turned out that a well was serving her that whole time. One of the questions I had for Mr. Hyde, was how did the City intend to charge sewerage based on the user’s winter quarter, when they had not yet taken readings at the beginning and end of the winter quarter for each customer. This and other legitimate questions I had, Mr. Hyde never answered. I must admit that these half-effort and non-answers from Mr. Hyde began to anger me. The other disharmony I obliquely referred to was the mass exodus of department heads and other key employees from City Hall. My intuition tells me that some serious things must have been going wrong for so many employees to leave around the same time. Perhaps though my intuition on this is off and it is all mere coincidence.

Regardless of that, I now feel that the answers and clear concern you provided today, has more than made up for my perception of the City’s weakness. It’s refreshing to see positive results so fast. Thank for leading Hailey’s orchestra in this good harmonic convergence.

Best regards,

Jim B.

P.S. Don’t know if you caught it in the March 11^th Journal, but I wrote another letter called, Kudos to Library Visionaries for the diligent Fire Safety efforts. (Letter 3 within link) I think I could have done more with the info you provided, but it seemed to come off as somewhat informative. Something else interesting is that even though Regional Historian Sandra Hofferber assured us that “the Community Library has always worked closely, and in full cooperation with the Ketchum Fire Department. As occasionally personnel turnover occurs and improved technologies come along, the library revisits this issue periodically, to assure that not only the building and its patrons will be safe, but so will its priceless contents and historical records.” -They still experienced a small fire coming from the heat tape in the outside gutters a few weeks later, which an alert construction worker in the area, noticed in time to alert the Ketchum Fire Department, who fortunately responded quick enough to minimize the damage.