by Victoria Howell
When Jim Crews, who previously served as Stevensville’s mayor from 2016 to 2018, filed to run for mayor of Stevensville last year, he said rumors immediately started swirling on social media and in the community that if he won he was going to fire everyone. At the time, he had been barred from town hall for allegedly harassing town employees.
Crews went on to defeat incumbent Bob Michalson in a very close race and now, two months into his second stint as mayor, he reflects on how things are going.
“Have I fired anyone?” he asks town clerk Jenelle Berthoud. “No sir,” she says.
The mayor sits at his desk in the front room of town hall, in an area shared with other administrative staff and visible to the general public.
Stevensville Mayor Jim Crews reflects on how things are going after the first two months of his second stint as mayor. He narrowly defeated incumbent Bob Michalson in the November election, during a time when Michalson had banned Crews from town hall for allegedly harassing staff. Crews says things are going pretty well so far. Photo by Victoria Howell.
“Well, it’s what I promised,” says Crews. “I promised I’d be visible. So, when people come to town hall, they look over, they see the mayor sitting here. If they want to talk to me, they can come on in and talk to me.”
Crews is making an effort to be responsive to the public, and said he answers the mayor’s phone and even if citizens call him on his personal phone, “I answer that too.”
When asked how things have been going, Crews said, “It’s interesting. I’m learning. Things have changed a little bit since I was mayor before. I’ve been spending the last two months getting to know everybody and getting to know everything again and seeing how we’re doing business. So far, business seems to be going pretty good. I’ve seen some things that we need to change but I’m not going to jump right in and start doing it. Get some feedback from our employees and get a better idea of how they think it ought to be done and go from there.”
As an example of something that needed to be changed, he mentioned Resolution 540, which generated a lot of attention at the last council meeting (see Bitterroot Star article, Feb. 18).
“That’s kind of a hard spot…” said Crews. “People are upset but I’m not sure why they’re upset.”
Crews said the town attorney is looking at the latest resolution, which has evolved from several previous resolutions which included adoption of a master fee schedule. He said the previous resolution established special event fees per event, number of days, plus numerous other fees for road closures, etc.
The fee schedule was passed in 2024, according to Crews, but he noticed when the farmers market submitted their special event permit application for this year, he believed that they weren’t being charged correctly based on the resolution’s wording. He thought the resolution should be cleaned up a bit and that resulted in Resolution 540A.
However, when the revised resolution was brought forward, there was an uproar with many complaining that it would be a hardship for the farmers market.
Resolution 540A was ultimately approved at the February 12 council meeting, but the special event permit application is still under revision. Crews believes that what the farmers market will pay this year is actually not going to be a hardship.
“The question is, is the farmers market a continuous event or an ongoing event?” said Crews. “We’re looking at approving it as an ongoing event that happens on multiple days. So there would be only one fee.” That would be the one-time $125 special event fee.
Crews said the Town also has to deal with the issue of power usage, because some vendors plug into power. The Town has overlooked charging people for power.
“The question is, what do we charge for that? We talked it over, and we had a COW meeting to do that, and people like the Civic Club came in, they said ‘you’re not charging enough for power.’”
“In the interim, we have pretty much decided, it’s $20 per day (per event) until we can get portable power meters to actually measure the power and charge actual usage,” said Crews.
So, regarding the farmers market, the event organizers will pay $20 per day times 23 days [for the 23 weeks the market runs] which equals $460 plus the $125 for a total of $585 for the season. Crews says this is less than they were supposed to be paying, because the way the old resolution read, it would be $1260.
“We’re not trying to run anybody out of town or anything like that,” said Crews.
In talking about the electricity used during special events, he compared it to what happened during a previous water leak situation in the town.
“Our people plugged into somebody’s house in an emergency to use electricity and we had people wanting to charge our employees with theft of services,” said Crews. “So here’s the question, do we allow a commercial vendor to plug into our power and use it for free on the taxpayers’ dime or do we ask them to pay for it?”
“You can’t just give things away that don’t belong to you,” he added. “We don’t own the power, the people do.”
Crews said that people [at the council meeting] didn’t understand what the special event fee totals were.
“They’re mad because they say I approved the permit,” said Crews. “Yeah, I tentatively approved it. But when I started reading, I found errors (in the resolution) and we needed to fix it. We have multiple things on our hit list that we need to fix.”
According to Crews, some people in the community have misunderstood his motivation, which is to follow the laws as written. If not, they need to be changed. As an example, he said some people thought he was going to try to “throw people off” the Planning and Zoning Board because they lived outside the jurisdiction of the board according to the board’s by-laws. But, said Crews, “There’s nothing that says they can’t change their by-laws. I went to the last meeting and talked to them about what they could do… it’s in progress.”
He said getting rid of people was not something he ever contemplated when taking over as mayor.
“It would be illegal and immoral,” said Crews. “Since I’ve been out of office things have changed a little bit. If I try to do something I try to do it slowly.”
One of his campaign promises was to tackle the issue of high water and sewer rates, which has been a perennial concern in Stevensville.
Crews said the council has approved his plan to start a water committee, with a council member as chairperson and four citizen members. He said he has lined up all but the fourth citizen.
“They’re going to start looking at our water and sewer situation and see what we’re obligated to do to change things and possibly reduce the rates,” said Crews. “It will be in their hands.”
Regarding other pending issues, such as fixing the water storage problem and other infrastructure, he said, “I haven’t hit those yet. It’s kind of like going to the dinner table and they’re serving up an elephant. You can’t eat the elephant all at once. You take it a bite at a time.”
Reflecting on his first two months in office, Crews said, “It’s taken me a little bit of practice to get back in the swing of running a meeting and realizing that there’s a lot of people that really want to be heard, so you just have to sit back and let them say what they need to say…”
He said one lesson learned is that it’s wise to spend more time on things before bringing them to the council, like with Resolution 540A.
“That was a quickly learned lesson,” he said. Revisions to the actual permit application are still being worked on and that should be brought back to council on March 12.
When asked how it feels to be mayor again, Crews said, “I’m thinking sometimes I should’ve just stayed retired.”
On the day he was interviewed, Crews had just paid off his home mortgage.
“It’s been a hard run for the last ten years, scrimping and saving… It’s a wonderful feeling. I was so happy I just about cried.”
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