Cabinetmaker creates civic legacy

LEHI — Retirement has put former mayor and civic leader George Tripp back into his backyard cabinet shop.

"I've been retired 14 years," said the former cabinetmaker who's now approaching 80. "I'm just as busy, but I can set my own schedule."

While he was building and installing cabinets throughout the Alpine School District, Tripp created a legacy in civic responsibility. As mayor from 1983-89, he was a major force behind the installation of pressurized irrigation in Lehi. The secondary water system may have been the first in Utah to come from a converted culinary water system.

City leaders and residents at the time were concerned about the aging water system because of lead in the pipes and joints.

"The town was out of water. (Some days) there was only six inches of water in the settling tanks. If we'd had a fire we would have had to let the city burn," he said.

So the city built a new, $4.7 million culinary water system that paved the way for Lehi's explosive growth today.

Tripp also worked on the city's finances, putting it on a sound financial basis that eventually led to a $500,000 surplus without raising taxes.

"One year we even had a tax decrease," he said.

After leaving the mayor's office, Tripp assumed the reins of the city power board. He was already intimately familiar with the power system, because he worked for the power department as a young man.

When Tripp was appointed chairman, the city had two electrical systems: the city system and a network owned by Utah Power and Light (now Rocky Mountain Power). When the power company raised its rates, Tripp led the board in trading the UP&L system for the city's two generators, which moved the power company out of town.

The city now buys power from a variety of sources.

But not all his efforts to get power for the city succeeded. He tried to get low-cost power from the Dworshak Dam generators on the north fork of the Clearwater River in Idaho. Although 52 entities involved in the system, including Indian tribes and government officials, supported the idea, the Northwest Power marketing director didn't want the Utah town in its market, so the effort failed, Tripp said.

"It would have been cheap power. I put a lot of effort into that to get it to go," he said.