Bear Lake Community Health Clinic Praised

Kudos To The Bear Lake Community Health Clinic And EMT

by Kathie B. Anderson

Yesterday, October 18, while I was waiting at the Bear Lake Community Health Clinic for a follow up medical issue and my flu shot, a young man was brought in for medical treatment. He had fallen from a balcony he was staining.  He thought he had broken his ribs, and was in severe pain and having difficulty breathing.  I was extremely impressed with the professionalism that I witnessed.  Physician Assistant Brittany Strong, and the nurses, Kristen Ferguson and Jennifer Earley Call, were amazing.  They did everything they could to help ease the pain of the patient.  An ambulance was called, and Life Support was contacted.  Dan Kurek, DeWayne Gifford, Andy Stokes, Kathy Hislop, Janene Kurek, Brett England, and Jamie Stokes responded immediately and were able to administer more needed help until the Air Med Helicopter arrived.  As I watched all the events take place, everyone did their respective jobs extremely well.  We are lucky to have such capable and qualified people in Garden City. 

After waiting 45 minutes while this trauma was going on, the PA and the nurses apologized for their departure and my having to wait.  I couldn’t believe they were so concerned about me, but it just shows how much we are valued as their patients.  Thank you Bear Lake Clinic, and EMT’s, for all you do.  You deserve our highest appreciation and gratitude.

Rich High School VS Altamont High School

Photo by Tammy Calder

Photo by Tammy Calder

Photo by Tammy Calder



 

The Muddled Male

Communicating

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

            When I was a young child our family lived in a small two-room log cabin in the little farming community of Croydon, Utah.  The first room, which served as a combination living room and bedroom, was the original log cabin built by someone many years before.  The second room was a lean-to tacked onto the back of the log cabin to provide a tiny kitchen area.  The addition of a small, round, tin tub on Saturday night turned the lean-to into a temporary bathing area.  There was no toilet except for an outhouse located way out back, and in the winter the distance from the cabin to the privy, as it was sometimes called, seemed to increase every time the temperature dropped.  The food storage room was a dirt cellar beneath the house, with half the cellar under the log cabin and half under the lean-to.  The trap door to the cellar was in the doorway between the cabin and the lean-to so that if someone opened the trapdoor to the cellar, everyone else had to stay in the room where they were when the door was opened.  In the spring it was easy to get a jar of home-bottled fruit because the cellar would often flood and the jars of peaches would float around just below the trap door. 

         I was thinking the other day just how much communication has changed since the time I was a child.  That thought came to me as I was waiting in line to order a new phone that would let me talk to anyone anywhere in the world at any hour and from any location, give me access to the internet, handle complicated and heavy duty calculations, let me send an instant letter without using a stamp, predict the weather, let me search for information, guide me to an unfamiliar destination, let me play games or watch a movie, let me send a message at a time convenient to me and let the receiving person view the message at a time convenient to them, and let me take slow-motion videos without the need for pricey equipment.  And all of this will fit into my shirt pocket without causing a bulge or making my shirt sag.

            Communication in my childhood was mostly by holler.  By that I mean that if you wanted to talk to a friend who was out in his field irrigating you would just walk half a mile to where he had planted his crop and stand at the fence and holler until he looked up.  If a child wanted to go play with a friend, he or she would walk a mile and a half to the friend’s house and then stand on the front lawn and holler until the friend came out.  If you wanted to get someone’s attention quickly, however, the accepted technique was to whisper the information in confidence to someone close by and the secret would spread all over town before you could get home.  The rumor mill, by the way, is still the best method for rapid communication in a small town…..especially when it is aided by the use of my new phone. 

            All the features I mentioned when discussing my new phone seemed at first to be an improvement in communication.  Then came texting.  Don’t misunderstand.  I like texting.  I use it a lot, in fact, because it is the only sure way of reaching one’s grandkids.  It also allows me to send a message to people any time of the day or night without worrying that I might be interrupting a nap or a meeting.  The thing that worries me, though, is that there is a whole generation coming along who doesn’t know how to communicate using complete sentences, punctuation, and real words instead of teenager hieroglyphics and emoticons.  And that is tough as well as confusing for those of us who are part of the senior citizen generation.  I am embarrassed to admit that I once received a text from a gorgeous lady and the text ended in “lol” which got my heart pumping because I thought it meant “lots of love.”  Think how embarrassed I was to discover that in today’s vernacular “lol” means “laugh out loud.”  So much for my being attractive to gorgeous ladies.  :’-(  Teenage speak meaning sad and crying.
 

Two Structures Burned In The Garden City Area

SWEETWATER, Garden City, Utah.  These two structures had fires in the last four days.  Thanks to quick action by the Garden City Fire District and the Laketown Fire District prevented even more damage.  One of these homes has fire insurance, the other does not.  Friends and LDS Church members helped with the clean up.


Trailer in Sweetwater area with plywood covering burned area. 
Photo by Bobbie Coray

House on Country Club Drive
Photo by Bobbie Coray

 

 



New Garden City Fire District Chief Needed

Garden City Fire Chief  Dan Kurek will be leaving Garden City to accept a position in California on October 18.

Garden City Fire District
Job Opening for Full-Time Fire Chief
The Garden City Fire District is now accepting applications for a fire chief. The Garden City Fire District is physically larger than Garden City proper, with boundaries on the north of the Idaho State line, on the east by Bear Lake, on the south by the rest area just north of Rendezvous Beach, and on the west by the Cache County border.

Salary: $42,500 per year with state retirement benefits, with a monthly stipend to purchase individual health insurance. This is a full-time exempt position, and may require recall to duty at any time of day, night, or weekend. This position includes exposure to high stress levels associated with the command and control of emergencies, and may include physical demands associated with firefighting activities.

Interested individuals please send resume, cover letter, and at least 5 letters of recommendation to Garden City Fire District, c/o Randall Knight, PO Box 374, Garden City, UT 84028. Applications will be accepted until November 8, 2013. The position may be reopened at any time if a desirable applicant is not found. The Garden City Fire District is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Garden City Fire District - Fire Chief Job Description

As the only full-time employee of the Garden City Fire District, the Fire Chief performs professional and administrative duties related to planning, organizing, directing, recruiting, and coordinating fire suppression and prevention activities within the district. Supervision Received Works under the broad policy guidance and direction from the Fire District Board.   Essential Functions:

1) Administer the day-to-day operations and internal affairs of the department and its services, as per policies and programs outlined by the board,

2) Responsible for Fire District homeland security,

3) Responsible for the preparation of department budgets, goal setting, and risk management,

4) Recruit and train paid-on-call volunteers firefighters, with a goal to meet or exceed the changing needs of the district  
    

RCT Makes Salt Lake Tribune News

By Paul Rolly, Tribune Columnist

Published: October 8, 2013 10:36PM

Could the Utah attorney general’s office just be consistent?

"Bobbie Coray — former economic development director and Chamber of Commerce president for Cache County, former state liquor commissioner and one-time congressional candidate — finally decided to get into an honest profession seven years ago.
 

She became a journalist, juggling numerous civic minded-projects with that noble First Amendment endeavor in her newly adopted home town of Garden City on the shores of Bear Lake, just to stay busy in semi-retirement.
 

Having a history as a Democrat in Republican northern Utah, she quickly made waves.
 

After years as a bureaucrat and policymaker, she found herself on the other side of the ledger, trying to find out what our stellar elected leaders are doing.
 

But, alas, the eager cub reporter for the Rich County Times weekly newspaper found that she and other probing journalists were locked out of staff meetings that preceded the public County Commission meetings, even though all three Rich County commissioners, all the other county elected officials and their paid aides were present.
 

She filed a formal complaint, alleging county officials were violating Utah’s open-meetings laws.
 

She won.
 

The Utah attorney general’s office compelled the Rich County Commission to open those meetings.

A few months later, though, the Rich County attorney’s office convinced the attorney general’s office that Rich was too small to be required to open staff meetings — even though Garden City’s even smaller meetings strictly follow the law and let in reporters and the public.
 

So for the past six years, Coray and her little band of First Amendment backers have sat outside the closed Rich County meetings.
 

Then, about a month ago, the attorney general’s office sent two attorneys to the Rich County Commission to discuss a water issue. When they asked the reporters why they were sitting outside the staff meeting and were told the media and the public couldn’t attend because they were closed sessions, the attorney general’s lawyers lectured the journalists on the law and said they had every right to be inside.
 

The attorneys were aghast that the reporters didn’t know that — until they were told it was the attorney general’s office’s ruling that kept them out."
 

prolly@sltrib.com

© Copyright 2013 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

ED Note:  Maybe we should try again to open our County Commission meetings now that the AG's office is being looked at more carefully?  We like being called a "little band of First Amendment backers"!  The Constitution is very careful to protect the press in efforts to report on government.

Joey Stocking of Garden City, alerted us to this article and said:

 

"You are absolutely right, Bobbie, that those staff meetings should be public. What does size of the county have to do with anything?  What does the county need to hide from the public in these meetings?  I do understand the reasons why a meeting can sometimes be closed to the public, but that list is very short.  For those interested here are the reasons a public meeting can be closed: http://le.utah.gov/code/TITLE52/htm/52_04_020500.htm

 

The county must state the reason they are closing the meetings.  What is the reason stated for these meetings being closed? "