On May 24, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced that a grand jury had charged Hans Burnett, a former foreman for the Cottonwood water testing facility, with forgery and fraudulent schemes and practices.
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office announced Burnett had pleaded guilty and was sentenced on Nov. 26 at Yavapai County Superior Court.
According to the AG’s office, Burnett will face a sentence of 120 hours of community service and three years of unsupervised probation, as well as a deferred jail sentence of 60 days if found in violation during his probation time.
“Burnett instructed his subordinate employees to modify test results and rewrite the paperwork associated with Cottonwood drinking water compliance samples,” stated a press release from the AG’s office. “The altered results were submitted to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality [ADEQ] as part of the Cottonwood laboratory’s drinking water compliance obligations.”
Both ADEQ and the city of Cottonwood have repeatedly stressed that despite the forgery, there was no evidence of actual contamination in the water supply. Cottonwood has since switched to sending its testing to a lab in Phoenix and maintaining a well-documented paper trail to prevent a repeat occurrence.
“I think it’s been a very valuable lesson to us. It pointed out some deficiencies and changes that are important to make,” said Roger Biggs, the city’s utilities manager for the water and billing divisions. Biggs said that after months of dealing with the fallout from the forgery, the sentence was fair, and hoped that the water company could move forward.
He reiterated that the city had no evidence of actual problems in the water supply beyond the paperwork issue and expressed hope that the city would do better in the future.
“It will always be a lesson that we cannot forget,” Biggs said. “It’s included in our training — not specifically that this guy screwed up and this is what happened, but we’ve tightened up our training and our procedures, gotten rid of our licenses. If we were to put it behind us entirely, I think we would run the risk of forgetting the valuable lesson that we’ve learned.”
“My goal is just to make sure that we build confidence in our water system and make sure that it never happens again,” Mayor Tim Elinski said. “I’m looking into ways we can make sure it never happens.”
“I can guarantee that we will do everything within our power to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Biggs said. “That’s the best we can do, try very hard every day to make sure everything is done exactly as it’s supposed to be done.”
Jon Hecht can be reached at 634-8551, or email jhecht@larsonnewspapers.com
