Utility boss is longest-serving city employee

When Greg Acton got out of the U.S. Army in 1974, there weren’t a lot of career options for an atomic demolitions munitions technician with top-secret government clearance.

Acton’s work with the military was so classified he still can’t divulge many details. Suffice it to say he had access to cryptographic nuclear weapons defense information.

He was studying mechanical and aerospace engineering at Montana State University when he got drafted during the Vietnam War era, and he had gotten married the same year he was called into military service.

 By the time he was discharged a little over three years later, Acton was at a crossroad, with no job and a wife and infant daughter to consider as well.

Acton and his family headed to Whitefish, where his parents had a cabin on Whitefish Lake. He planned to live there rent-free while he figured out how to make a living.

Even with the G.I. bill paying his tuition, Acton didn’t think he had the financial means to finish college, so he took a job with the city of Whitefish. It was grunt work — a lot of manual labor with the utility systems, mostly with the water system.

Nearly 42 years later, Acton is wrapping up his career with the city. He has held several positions within the Public Works Department, including division manager of water and wastewater, chief utilities operator/supervisor and utility operations supervisor.

With more than four decades of service, Acton is the longest-serving city employee. Whitefish Human Resource Director Sherri Baccaro said she searched the files to find someone who has worked for Whitefish longer than Acton, and found no one.

“He’s holding the record,” Baccaro said.

Acton hadn’t been on the job very long before he had a chance to become a certified officer for the city. That certification cemented his career path.

“Everything after that was history,” he said.

He soon became the water foreman, and when the sewer foreman retired, Acton took on that role as well. When the city built a new water treatment plant in 2000, it was Acton’s job to oversee the project.

He honed his information technology ability — another skill from which the city has benefited — as the new water treatment plant got up and running.

“I was spending a lot of time doing IT,” he recalled. “About a year I was stuck in the office working the bugs out.”

Acton has been around the city long enough to witness several boom-and-bust cycles.

“There’s been growth, stagnation, then growth again,” he said.

Whitefish is seeing a flurry of growth again, perhaps, Acton said, because people who had cash bought lots at bargain prices during the recession that began in 2008 and lasted for several years.

Whitefish is unique with its sizable number of second-home owners, and that creates an additional dimension of operating city utilities, he added.

The next big utility project for Whitefish is a roughly $20 million upgrade of the wastewater treatment plant within the next five years.

The Montana Department of Environmental Quality in 2012 issued the city an administrative order of consent following several violations of the city’s wastewater discharge permit. The order later was updated to incorporate a compliance plan detailing the work needed to bring the treatment plant into compliance by 2021.

Acton said his replacement, who has an engineering degree, will have oversight over the wastewater plant improvements, just as he did when the water plant was built.

As for Acton, it’s time to go fishing, he said. He bought a boat two years ago to accommodate his angling pastime that takes him to Flathead Lake, Lake Koocanusa and the waters around North Vancouver Island.

Whitefish will continue to be home for Acton and his wife, Caprice. The couple have two children, Nicole, a lawyer, and Ryan, who works for Sandry Construction in the Flathead Valley. Acton plans to spend plenty of retirement time with his 7-year-old grandson.

A retirement party is planned for Acton from 4 to 6 p.m. Friday at the Whitefish Public Works Shop, 545 W. 18th St.