🚧 SIGN, SIGN, EVERYWHERE A SIGN

Fairview has spent months arguing about a single commissioner.

Meanwhile, the biggest story in town was sitting out by the highway.

There were warning signs—the smell of something smoking long before anyone saw flame. And then, because Fairview is nothing if not literal, there were actual signs. Three welcome signs: east side, west side, and Highway 96.

Those three signs turned out to be a preview of everything that followed.

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Last summer, the Fairview Board of Commissioners decided to replace the city’s welcome signs.

Commissioner Don Bufalini asked the unglamorous questions. What did the design work cost? What had been budgeted? Then-City Manager Tom Daugherty explained that the money came from bond funds that had to be spent by December. Use it or lose it.

Mayor Lisa Anderson then produced a third, Concept C, a pricier AI-generated design from the planning department. It was her favorite. It “spoke to me,” she said.

City Planner Ethan Greer had the unenviable job of telling the mayor her dream render would not survive contact with a construction estimate. He used gentler words. The AI image was lovely, he said. It just wasn’t especially realistic once you priced out everything the computer had cheerfully imagined in limestone and landscaping.

The public split almost evenly. Concept C won by a single vote.

The board did not. On September 4, 2025, Anderson moved to approve Concept C. Roberts seconded. The motion passed 5-0. Even Bufalini, after asking the hard questions, voted yes.

The final contract came to $163,692, plus another roughly $15,000 to $20,000 in design work.

The welcome signs weren’t the problem. They were the symptom. At a moment when the city’s finances were already drifting in the wrong direction, the board showed no particular urgency about money. “Use it or lose it” was reason enough to spend nearly $180,000.

Nine months later, that same board told residents a 42% property tax increase was unavoidable.

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Last month, as the tax increase became unavoidable, Bufalini cast the lone vote against it.

But the meeting wasn’t over.

Next came an ethics complaint against Bufalini. The board voted to refer the matter to an outside investigator. During the discussion, Mayor Lisa Anderson told the board that an anonymous manila envelope containing material about Bufalini had arrived at her place of business. She said she distributed it to commissioners and city staff. City Attorney Patrick Carter said on the record that he wanted no part of anonymous material in a live ethics matter.

The relationship between Anderson and Bufalini was not new. In 2024, Anderson served as campaign treasurer for incumbent Commissioner Stuart Johnson. Johnson lost that election. Bufalini won it.

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For contrast, in March, former City Manager Tom Daugherty admitted he hired his son-in-law into the Planning Department back in July 2024. Daugherty argued he did not directly supervise the position. MTAS disagreed. Under state guidance, a city manager sits in the line of supervision for every city employee.

Daugherty resigned, and the board accepted his resignation on a 3-2 vote. The two votes to keep him in the chair came from Mayor Lisa Anderson and Commissioner Wayne Hall.

Anderson was defiant. Tom Daugherty was “the best City manager that Fairview has ever had,” she said. The anonymous tipster who had flagged the violation was, in her words, “a coward.”

Three months later, another anonymous tip arrived—this one in a manila envelope addressed to the mayor. That one was copied and distributed to commissioners and city staff.

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Now, back to the money. The tax increase wasn’t fate. It was a bill for what the room had been busy with.

While the mayor was focused on an AI rendering of a welcome sign, and while the city manager was hiring his son-in-law into Planning, nobody at the top of Fairview government was minding the number.

A year before that welcome-sign vote, the county reappraised, property values jumped, and the board adopted a 59-cent property tax rate.

Then the city’s finances caught up with it. By the time the books closed in June, the city’s net position had fallen more than two million dollars—a slide more than twenty times the year before. The city’s reserves shrank. The signs got built anyway.

By spring, the math had caught up. Interim City Manager Bob Rial arrived with a real budget.

By then, the June meeting had other business: an ethics referral against Bufalini and the manila envelope the mayor circulated to staff and commissioners herself.

The board voted to raise the rate to 84 cents—a 42% increase.

Then it spent the rest of the meeting on Don Bufalini.