The Uinta County Commissioners received two things at their meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 15: a docket full of pending county business and an earful.
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EVANSTON — The Uinta County Commissioners received two things at their meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 15: a docket full of pending county business and an earful.
Several items of business were handled, but perhaps the most notable was a public outcry about standing rules enforced at the Uinta County Fair earlier this month.
Patricia Bindl, a 4-H leader, took to the podium midway through the meeting to express her “fair concerns” involving rules she thinks are working to “punish mistakes rather than choices.”
She spoke at length, 32 minutes to be exact, about the injustice that many 4-H and FFA kids allegedly faced because of technical difficulties, “rule Nazis” and misunderstandings at this year’s fair.
Bindl used Emma Murray as an example. Having gone through months of preparation over the summer for the fair, Emma Murray showed up on the day of weigh-in to a pen labeled with her name, but she soon found out she was missing one key official form — causing her to be disqualified from showing her lambs.
“They knew she was coming. We sent her paperwork in three to four days before it was due,” said Emma Murray’s mom, Tammy Murray.
Despite all of this, following an appearance in front of the fair board for reconsideration, Murray was denied entrance into the livestock show.
“We had to take our lambs off the property immediately. That one missing paper determined Emma’s whole summer,” Tammy Murray said.
Passionate about the experience kids have at the fair, Bindl says she doesn’t “want to see tears from any more hardworking kids.”
She called for changes to the rules and the way the fair is handled, saying, “4-H is the fair, and it should be fair — for everybody.”
The county commissioners sat patiently listening as Bindl shared her list of concerns with the way the rules at the fair were implemented. When she was done, she was asked if she had shared her grievances with the Uinta County Fair Board, to which she responded, “I talked to the fair board last year and they just seemed to overlook it.”
“We don’t know what the hell goes on out there,” commissioner Wendell Fraughton responded. “It’s not our job to be out there managing all these rules; that’s the fair board’s job.”
Commissioner South suggested a work session with 4-H leaders, parents and the fair board to work out the issues, to hear both sides of the incidents that were shared and to come to a community conclusion.
Reminding the public that there’s another side to every story, fair board president Joel Georgis responded to this criticism.
“People need to understand that our true intention is to put the kids first,” he said. “We don’t want to exclude any kids; we want the rules to be obeyed and for everything to run smoothly.”
The other side of this story and these allegations will be heard at a work session scheduled by the county commissioners. The meeting begin at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 19, as an extensionof the commissioners’ work session that day. The public is welcome to attend. It will be at this meeting that a solution to the public outcry over the fair rules will be sought.
In other news, the commissioners approved a grant application for the Uinta County Museum and learned from a speed study on Highway 150 that increasing the speed limit to 70 mph will be acceptable.
The next commission meeting will be held at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 29, in the Uinta County Complex.