In July 2017, the Arizona Department of Health Services and Department of Environmental Quality informed the city of Cottonwood it had opened an investigation into the city’s water testing system.
Last May, the Arizona Attorney General’s office indicted Hans Burnett, a former foreman at the city of Cottonwood’s water testing laboratory, with charges of forgery and fraudulent schemes and practices.
The Cottonwood Journal Extra has since learned that an additional Cottonwood employee, Mathew Westcott, pleaded guilty to charges of facilitation to commit forgery in Yavapai Superior Court on May 4, in a plea agreement with the Arizona Attorney General’s Of ce. Cottonwood Human Resources Department confirmed that Wescott continues to be employed by the city.
Most documents for the case remain under seal. Both the Attorney General’s Office and the office of Yavapai County Public Defender’s Kennedy Klagge, who serves as counsel for Wescott, declined to comment for this story.
Westcott did not respond to numerous attempts to contact him.
The case minutes suggest that Westcott has cooperated fully with the prosecution. The state has waived the requirement for Wescott to appear in court for future hearings, as long as he remains in contact with his attorney.
Cottonwood City Manager Doug Bartosh said that the city government was aware of Westcott’s involvement in the forgery scandal, but did not feel that Wescott’s actions were problematic, and defended the city’s decision to keep him on, feeling that Westcott’s mistakes were not his fault.
“At the time Matt was involved with this, he had been with the city maybe a month or two months at the most,” Bartosh said. “He was taking instruction from his supervisor, who was Hans Burnett at the time. [He was] a guy who really didn’t know what he was doing, was being instructed by somebody else.”
“Other than this one issue, he really wasn’t involved that much,” Bartosh said. “He went out and took onesample that they knew was probably going to come back as a positive for chloroform, and somebody, probably Hans, told him, ‘Don’t worry about it, you collected it wrong, we’ll go take another one and just disregard this one.’”
Bartosh said he did not know any further details of Wescott’s involvement with the Attorney General’s Office, but suspected that the plea agreement may have involved helping the prosecution in investigating the issue.
“From our point of view, Matt really isn’t culpable for what happened, and he’s proven to be a very good employee, very conscientious, and quite honestly, DHS never had a problem with him going back into the lab and doing tests,” Bartosh said. “Other employees, they said these employees should not be in the lab, they don’t know what they’re doing, but Matt was not one of those.”
ADEQ has repeatedly said in the wake of the water testing scandal that although the paperwork had been forged, there was no evidence that there had been actual serious contamination of Cottonwood’s water system.
Cottonwood has since changed its practices to have water testing outsourced to a lab in Phoenix to avoid a repeat problem.
Representatives of the Cottonwood Water Utility did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Jon Hecht can be reached at 634-8551, or email jhecht@larsonnewspapers.com
