Fair board hires Brewer, berates newspaper

The Great Northern Fair board voted 5-2 at their monthly meeting Tuesday night to hire Dave Brewer as the new manager of the Great Northern Fairgrounds.

Board members Tyler Smith, Scott Doney and Jack Solomon all voted to hire Brewer. Smith, who chaired the meeting, said absent Board Chair Paul McCann and Vice Chair Karla Vaughn told him they wanted to vote to hire Brewer.

Chelby Gooch and Ray Kallenberger voted against hiring Brewer.

Smith  said the board was holding a public vote on Brewer's hiring after a story in the Havre Daily News reported  the board had violated state public meetings law by voting to hire Brewer without publishing notice of the vote at least 48 hours before.

Smith said before the vote that the board may have inadvertently broken some laws through the way they hired Brewer because they were trying to conduct business more efficiently.

After the vote, Smith criticized the Havre Daily News for its coverage of the unpublicized vote.

"I guess I will echo, my high school shop teacher's words, 'If you are not part of the ... solution you are part of the problem,' and I guess the negative-type article on the front page of the paper is, I believe, part of the problem," Smith said.

Doney said board members invest a great deal of time in the upkeep of the fairgrounds especially since former fairgrounds manager Bob Horne resigned in November.

"I mean, we work our tails off to try to keep this going and then all you do is get home from work and read some baloney story on the front page of the paper," Doney said.

He said  there are plenty of positive things happening at the fairgrounds.

"It would be nice if you could go home and read a positive story about the fairgrounds instead of everything being negative," Doney said.

Smith said there were aspects of the stories the Havre Daily News ran about Brewer's hiring that were false. The article reported the wrong date of the Board's next meeting and ran a correction after the mistake was brought to the paper's attention.

He said there always seems to be details that are incorrect in Havre Daily stories about the fair board.

Doney said stories about the trouble the board has had keeping a manager do not help the board's image with the public and that it is widely known that the county has had trouble retaining a fairgrounds manager.

"It's like, how many times do you want to beat that horse?" Doney asked.

"It's like, move forward, report something new because I do have a problem with it."

The board also discussed designating someone to be the board's contact with the media.