Peterson retires from helm of Havre Public Work

After 34 years with Havre Public Works and over two decades as its director Dave Peterson will be retiring at the end of this month from a career he said he's enjoyed and one he hopes has made a positive difference in the city.

"I've thoroughly enjoyed the job," Peterson said in an interview earlier this week. "I believe I'm leaving the city of Havre in a better place than when I first started and I'm not going to have a lot of regrets."

Peterson, who will go on to become coordinator for the St. Mary Rehabilitation Working Group, said he's enjoyed his time with the department, but times are changing and after a lot of conversations with his wife, he's decided the time has come to pass the reins along.

"I've done what I needed to do and it may be time for someone else to come in," he said. "Someone new, someone, maybe, with a little more energy, or new ideas. Things have changed over the years."

He said he originally intended to leave the department at the end of 2022, but when his then-Deputy Public Works Director Jeff Jensen announced his plans to retire he pushed his plans back so he and the city would have time to find a replacement and give them enough time to get up to speed before he left.

"I didn't want to leave the city in a lurch, you know," he said.

Trevor Mork will become Havre's new Public Works Director at the beginning of April. Peterson said Mork has his full confidence and he'll still be available to assist the department during the transition.

Peterson said looking back there's certainly a lot that has changed at the department since he began there a year after graduating from Northern Montana College, but the most striking change is technology.

He said when he was first interviewed for the job he presented some of the work he had done earning his Construction Engineering Technology degree in the 1.0 version of AutoCAD, a computer-aided design and drafting software application.

He said he remembers his interviewer saying they weren't likely to be using any technology like that anytime soon, but within 18 months they were using AutoCAD.

Before coming to Public Works, he said, he spent a year working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls as a Quality Control Technician for a contracting company that specialized in military contracts.

He said he originally wanted to do highway design, a subject that really fascinated him, but he went where the job was and after a year in Great Falls an old friend got in touch and told him about an opening at Havre Public Works.

He said his friend was leaving the department, saying the job didn't work for him but he thought Peterson might like it.

Peterson said he felt the same and he took the opportunity to come home and see for himself.

"I came back because I like the community," Peterson said. "I was born here, I grew up here, I graduated here, I have a lot of family here, so for me, it was a great job."

He said he originally applied to be director after the previous one retired in 1997 but wasn't selected. When the position opened up again in 2000 he was appointed to the position by then-Mayor Phyllis Leonard.

Looking back on his time, since then, he said, there are a number of accomplishments he and his department made that he's proud of, but the standout is the rehabilitation of Highway 2, which was a multi-jurisdictional project.

Before the project, Peterson said, the area of the highway by the Duck Inn would see terrible flooding whenever they would get substantial rain, and water breaks were much more frequent.

However, after extensive rehabilitation of a lot of aging infrastructure and increasing the size of the pipe to drain that area, the department was able to massively improve the situation, which not only made the community better, but meant his department wouldn't have to spend so much time on constant water breaks.

He said seeing big projects like that culminate successfully, those are the moments on the job that he's loved the most, like the multi-million dollar additions made to the city's water treatment plants and stormwater system upgrades.

Peterson said he's also thrilled that the city will soon be able to hook into the North Central Regional Water System, which he said will supplement the city's existing water system and act as a contingency for future situations.

He said the city is still going to use the Milk River and its existing water infrastructure, but being part of the new system will keep the city supplied with water even if Milk River completely dried up.

"This is huge," he said.

Peterson said these moments stand out, but overall, the thing he's enjoyed most about the job was working with his fellow employees, who he said have taught him more than anything else.

He said when he was first appointed, he tried to go out in the field with his teams as much as possible to see exactly the kinds of things they were dealing with in the hopes that it would help him understand their situations better and be a better supervisor.

He said he has employees who have been with the department and at the water plants who have been doing their jobs for going on 40 years and know exactly what they're doing, and a lot of the time all they need is support from him to solve problems.

Peterson said the things his department does help the community and make it a more attractive place for people to come to, and the department's employees are who make all that happen.

"When I have good people doing the jobs, it makes my job a lot easier, so I give my employees a lot of credit for what's happened in the department and the city," he said.

Peterson said he's very happy that he's been able to help the department get new and better equipment during his time there, which helps everyone do their jobs better and safer.

He said his time with the department has been great overall, but it hasn't been without its hardships.

He said taking on the role of director makes him the primary public-facing person at the department and while they hear a lot of positivity, there are always people who get annoyed when the department points out things like code violations.

Peterson said he understands why people get irritated by things like that, as the vast majority of them are doing what they need to do to keep their properties safe, but there are a lot of codes and they are complex so violations happen.

He said when he's talking to people wanting to build things a certain way, sometimes he has to firmly tell them no when the plans violate codes and regulations, and that's a hard thing to do, especially in a small town where he's personally interacting with people he knows all the time.

When it comes to infrastructure issues in the city, he said, people don't always understand the amount of resources and time his department works with and in vast majority of cases the things people want done are things he and his colleagues want to do, but there is only so much money and time they have to work with.

He said, their inability to address the city's streets is the one thing that he will regret being unable to do, even if the circumstances leading to that are outside his ability to control.

"The thing that hits me the hardest is not being able to do more for the infrastructure," he said, "especially the roads."

He said water and sewer systems can be addressed with grants, but there just aren't the same opportunities with roads, and when it costs well over $30,000 to repave one block, the city just doesn't have enough to address all of its road issues.

"The money just isn't always there," he said.

Despite these issues, he said, he gets a lot more positive feedback from people than negative which makes the occasional bad interaction a relatively small issue in the scope of what has been a great job.

As for what comes next, Peterson said, he will be going on to become the coordinator for the St. Mary Rehabilitation Working Group, an organization formed to help fix the aging conveyance works that supplies the area, including local irrigators, with water, an organization he's been a part of since its inception decades ago.

The project to fix the conveyance works has been years in the making and will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and Peterson said he's hoping that recent funding through Montana Sen. Jon Tester's bi-partisian infrastructure bill will open the door to finally getting the rest of the project funded.

"I want to see that project come to fruition," he said.

The position is part time, he added, so he'll still be able to enjoy plenty of his retirement, but he hopes he'll be able to help the group stay informed and operate more smoothly during his time in the position.