Fish in the running for town council

John Fish is among the candidates on the ticket for Thermopolis Town Council. Fish has lived in Thermopolis for nearly 40 years, and he’s been employed at Hot Springs State Park for 26 years, 24 of which he’s served in an administrative position.

“Managing the park on a day-to-day basis,” Fish stated, “is like managing a city. You deal with people; 1.5 million visitors come through the park annually. We also contend with law enforcement issues, trash and litter sanitation issues, water distribution services, roads and traffic and signage issues. Our 19 lessees/concessionaires are our businesses, just like downtown.”

Fish believes we need unbiased recipients at the administrative levels of our city government and he wants to be proactive on issues like the landfill, as what he hears is the EPA making the decision for us. When the landfill is full, he stated, we’ll have to haul our trash someplace else, which would require buying new garbage trucks and hiring operators. The cost of this, he noted, would be put on the residents of Thermopolis.

Fish suggested looking into recycling in which the town would supply receptacles for recycling to each family, and recyclable items could be hauled to a facility where they could be sorted, baled and loaded on semis or trains.

Fish also wants to address the rift that’s developed between the police department and county attorney’s office, determine what practices are causing the conflicts and make sure they cease in order to get our law enforcement agencies working together toward the goal of getting bad people off our streets and prosecuted.

He also would like to see the community being proactive as a whole, capitalizing on what we have in order to keep visitors here longer than a couple hours, recruiting new business into the town and county and growing as a whole.