Collbran – The Town Hall, with its clean red-brick walls and arched windows, is the nicest building in town – nice and empty.
Five of the six full-time municipal employees in this town of about 300 residents quit last week, leaving Town Hall vacant at the close of the business day Friday.
The town administrator of 18 years is gone. So is the town clerk, the public works director, the billing clerk and the lone public works employee.
Three of the five board of trustee members remaining after an earlier spate of resignations also quit Friday night.
That leaves three elected town officials, the marshal and a summer maintenance man scrambling to keep the town operating.
“If this were happening anywhere else, it would be hysterical,” Mayor John Blady said.
How did Collbran, which sits on the Plateau River, below Mesa County’s Vega Reservoir, come to this?
While specifics are hard to come by outside the knots of townsfolk gabbing outside Ole Dad’s Liquor or on the patio of The Creamery restaurant, it appears to have begun in April 2004.
That’s when Blady, a former juvenile court referee and tribal judge who moved to Collbran from Arizona just three years earlier, won the mayor’s election. That tipped the carefully balanced politics of this small community.
Four days after first pounding his gavel, Blady began questioning the town budget and the salaries of city employees – which reportedly reached upwards of $60,000. That’s a goodly sum in this ranching community.
The board of trustees responded by stripping him of all powers but ceremonial duties. He could only kiss babies and cut ribbons.
Questions about the budget and the treatment of the mayor prompted a recall against five of the trustees.
Before that mail-in recall could give residents a say, three of the targeted trustees resigned.
One of the departing trustees accused Blady or abusing his powers and said he too should be recalled.
The Plateau Valley Times jumped into the fray with what some locals viewed as a bit of muckraking when publisher Rick Lucas printed the town budget.
Things began spiraling. Questions of nepotism were raised on a no-bid bike-path contract that went to a town official’s relative.
A former trustee, Penny Maigatter, who owns the town’s beauty parlor, was pushed to resign after detractors discovered she had let her beautician’s license expire.
Comment from the municipal employees Friday was terse.
“I want you to leave now,” said a grim- faced billing clerk Suzanne Belotti from behind the counter at Town Hall on Friday, when asked if any of the outgoing officials or employees might comment.
“No comment,” was all former town administrator Bruce Smith would say when reached by phone at his home in the neighboring town of Mesa.
On Friday, Blady’s powers were reinstated as three more trustees resigned.
“I’m back to being a mayor now rather than a baby-kisser,” Blady said.
And for the time being, that is going to be a big job.
There’s a new town staff to hire, a recall election to finish up against one trustee, sewer and water plants to keep running and the daily town billing, correspondence and record keeping to stay on top of.
One plan is to use volunteers.
Townspeople and folks from neighboring towns have offered to mow the park, answer phones and make sure the sewer plant is doing its job.
In the end, Collbran remains a friendly place where folks leave keys in cars, hug each other at lunch and have no problem when neighbors borrow something without asking.
“It’s just a nice, small community,” said Bud Benning, owner of the Collbran Laundromat. “This is one of those things that didn’t need to happen.”
Staff writer Nancy Lofholm can be reached at 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com.
