A few days later, City Council President John Janssen—who would
become Mayor within weeks—sat under an umbrella outside of the
rubble that had been city hall, debating the town’s future with City
Manager Steve Hewitt and then-Mayor Lonnie McCollum.
“We knew that there was no point in doing what we had been doing
before; it hadn’t been working,” Janssen recalls. “We were rural and
isolated, not a bedroom community that could rely on the resources of a
bigger city. So we decided that if the town was going to survive, we