Residents say Julie Fullmer was the type of mayor who would give out her cellphone number, responding to complaints at all hours about unplowed snow routes or broken sprinklers. She regularly encouraged residents, especially women, to run for City Council and volunteer on boards.
Elected as a councilwoman in 2013 and as mayor four years later, she has helped guide Vineyard’s rapid growth from a farming town of 177 to a city of more than 14,000. She prides herself on a list of accomplishments, including the transformation of a shuttered steel mill into trails, townhomes, housing subdivisions and what developers hope might someday become Utah City — a downtown rivaling that of Salt Lake City.
That venture was supposed to put Vineyard on the map. Instead, it has become the latest point of contention about the mayor’s leadership, according to interviews with nearly two dozen Vineyard officials and residents, as well as a review of campaign disclosures, emails, recordings of Council meetings and community posts online.
Citizens have signed two petitions in recent years calling for Ms. Fullmer, 39, to resign. An adversary on the City Council has demanded scrutiny of her spending. And in elections last month, residents overwhelmingly voted to weaken the mayor’s powers.
Showing a penchant for secrecy, she pledged $5 million in 2020 — without council members’ knowledge — for a controversial lake development project. She has largely self-funded her political campaigns, but residents are in the dark about the sources of her and her husband’s income (her role as mayor is only a part-time job). And recently, her ex-husband came forward to make startling claims about her past.
Dr. David Sylvester II, 39, an oral surgeon in St. Louis, spoke with a small group of Vineyard residents and a city councilman this summer. He said that during their marriage, which ended in 2010, Ms. Fullmer pretended she was working for a graphic-design company, though she had left; faked a pregnancy, then a miscarriage; and accumulated years’ worth of debt. In emails after they separated that he shared with The New York Times, The Salt Lake Tribune and the councilman, Ms. Fullmer said she had an “addiction” to deception.
In a statement, the mayor, who did not dispute the authenticity of the emails, said that she had been “forced” to write one of them and that her actions had “occurred in the context of an abusive relationship.” Dr. Sylvester denied any abuse on his part.
Ms. Fullmer also asserted that her former marriage bore “no relevance to my current public service.” She defended her record, writing, “I stand by all the good we have done since I have started serving in the community.”
After a reporter sent Ms. Fullmer a list of questions for this article, the Vineyard City attorney sent an email to council members asserting that The Times had relied on “factually incorrect” information from sources. The attorney warned the Council against publicly discussing the claims in this article, noting it could “harm you and/or the city and could invite legal action.”
Councilman Jacob Holdaway, a prominent critic of Ms. Fullmer, said he interpreted the email as a threat. The attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
The allegations against Ms. Fullmer would amount to nasty small-town politics, except that Vineyard is no longer a small town. Its prime real estate and exploding population have made it influential in Utah politics. The conflict there is also the latest example of how battles over natural resources — and who profits off them — continue to shape state policy.
Debate over development projects has led some residents to say that Ms. Fullmer has become too deferential to developers and not protected the community’s interests.
“She has an agenda only she sees,” said Tim Blackburn, a planning commissioner until last year, adding, “People just don’t trust her to fulfill her commitments.”
Ezra Nair, city manager from 2022 to 2023, praised much of Ms. Fullmer’s record but said she wasn’t always willing to collaborate. “Julie’s had some decisions where it would’ve been better if she had trust in other folks.”
Property investors are a powerful lobbying force in Utah, and more than a third of the state’s lawmakers make money off real estate. But more than 60 percent of the state’s land is owned by the federal government, prohibiting its development. And Utah’s urban core is pinched by mountains to the east and the Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake to the west.
That has made Vineyard, which has hundreds of acres ripe for development since the cleanup of its steel mill, an enticing opportunity for builders. It sits at the heart of one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation, and right next to Silicon Slopes, Utah’s booming tech center.
Vineyard is a pretty city, with new homes and manicured gardens on gently curving streets. Like the rest of Utah County, the community is conservative and religious. Nearly three-quarters of the residents are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“We have a culture that tends to not want to talk about problems,” said Mr. Holdaway, a sixth-generation resident whose Mormon pioneer family founded Vineyard in 1899. He joined the City Council in January after campaigning on a platform of transparency and holding Ms. Fullmer accountable. He won in a landslide.
“What have I accomplished?” Mr. Holdaway, 43, said in a recent interview. “Not a damn thing.”
Before he was sworn into office, Ms. Fullmer and her departing allies pushed through last-minute procedural changes — making it impossible for him to undo some of the mayor’s actions without all four council members’ support. The mayor makes appointments to boards and committees. Unlike other council members, Mr. Holdaway has not received any assignments.
Ms. Fullmer, in her statement, said that Mr. Holdaway’s tenure was marked by “bullying and spreading falsehoods about me and others.” She rejected criticism from him and others that she was too cozy with developers, saying her approach had been collaborative across the community and her focus was on “ensuring that Vineyard thrives — not just today but for generations to come.”
Sara Cameron, a small-business owner, also won a Council seat this year after campaigning with Mr. Holdaway over concerns about Utah City and promising government transparency. But she has grown wary of his aggressive approach and more sympathetic to the mayor. She has accomplished a lot for the community, Mrs. Cameron said, adding, “She hasn’t done everything perfect.”
Shortly after Ms. Fullmer began her second term in January 2022, residents learned that she had quietly backed the Utah Lake artificial islands development, a project that would have dredged the naturally shallow lake next to Vineyard and used sediment to build island real estate for a half-million people. It would have plowed a freeway through Vineyard and the Holdaway family’s land.
Ms. Fullmer wrote a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency saying the city “strongly” supported the developer’s efforts and pledged $5 million in public funds. She issued the letter without notifying the Council, even as other lakeside cities and ecologists expressed skepticism or denounced the project. Developers used the document in an unsuccessful attempt to get nearly $1 billion in federal loans, and billions more in private investments.
After a presentation with the letter became public in January 2022, Ms. Fullmer said her promises were appropriate, drawing on funds that had been earmarked for lakeshore improvements. But her support in the community began to erode.
That February, she and the Council voted to take a neutral position on the dredging project and rescinded the letter, the mayor noted in her statement. But she did not formally notify the developers until eight months later, after the Utah attorney general determined that turning the state-owned lake bed into private real estate was not legal.
Since then, Mr. Holdaway and his supporters have raised concerns about Ms. Fullmer’s finances and potential conflicts of interest. They question how she funded trade missions to Ukraine and India, where she ostensibly represented the city even though the Council had not approved her travel expenses.
Some residents were surprised in 2022 when she ran for Utah’s First Congressional District, which covers the northern corner of the state, even though Vineyard lies in the Third District. Ms. Fullmer almost entirely self-funded the campaign. She drew on more than $100,000 in payments and loans, according to campaign disclosures.
Financial disclosures show Ms. Fullmer’s main source of income is through her part-time job as mayor, which paid $24,000 last year. She also reported earnings from a rental home in nearby Mapleton, on the market for $1.25 million, acquired by her current husband, Curtis Fullmer, in 2021.
Mr. Fullmer, whom the mayor married in 2010, is listed as self-employed, but the mayor’s disclosures report no income from her spouse. The mayor said in her statement that she had made money before becoming mayor and that she and her husband had been “wise in managing” their assets.
Dr. Sylvester, her ex-husband, wed Ms. Fullmer a few months after they met at a Kansas City Latter-day Saint congregation in 2004 when they were both 19.
Three years into their marriage, she faked a pregnancy, she confessed in emails with him after their separation in 2009. She obtained sonograms from a hospital after saying she was an art student preparing a project about births, then presented them as her own, she told him.
Months later, she faked a miscarriage, according to the emails. At the time, she told her husband that a friend was driving her to get ice cream when they got into a collision. But there was no crash and no friend. She doctored medical records and claimed amnesia when pressed for details, she wrote.
She racked up debt, and in a recorded conversation with him, she acknowledged forging his signature to take out a loan.
When Dr. Sylvester began divorce proceedings, Ms. Fullmer admitted to years of deception. “I am sick with addiction,” she wrote in an August 2009 email, saying she had sought treatment for compulsive lying.
In 2011, Ms. Fullmer and her current husband bought their house in Vineyard. They embarked on a yearlong trip around the world, which they documented on a blog. She ran for Council two years later and became mayor in 2018.
Kristal Price, a Vineyard resident, said Ms. Fullmer encouraged her to run for Council. (She ultimately lost.)
“She said, ‘My office is full of liberals,’” Mrs. Price recalled. “‘I don’t trust anybody.’”
Mrs. Price helped with the mayor’s 2021 campaign. When residents complained on social media about restaurants and businesses not keeping pace with Vineyard’s rapid growth, the mayor wrote a 972-word reply and asked Mrs. Price to post it using her own account, text messages show.
Mrs. Price also won a raffle at an event hosted by Ms. Fullmer encouraging women to seek office. The mayor presented her with a certificate detailing the prize — an all-expenses-paid, three-day trip to Washington — but the listed sponsors told a reporter they had not been involved in the raffle or committed funds for the travel. Almost a year later, the mayor sent Mrs. Price $500 on Venmo, according to text messages.
Ms. Fullmer said she made the payment after the sponsor “backed out at the last minute.” Mrs. Price, however, did not take the trip because the money was not enough to cover travel costs.
The latest frustrations with the mayor revolve around Utah City. City officials say it is just another name for a development long in the works, meant to clean up an old industrial site and create a downtown. Huntsman Cancer Institute recently announced plans to open a new campus there, which Ms. Fullmer touted as a sign of the project’s success.
But some Vineyard residents see Utah City as another example of her deference to developers. While many community members say they support more amenities and a diversified tax base, they note slow progress in attracting other businesses. All the housing units announced to date are rentals. And creating a dense, transit-focused downtown surrounded by Utah County’s suburban sprawl is unrealistic, they say, and would worsen parking problems.
“More density lowers the quality of life,” said Daria Evans, a retiree who worried the mayor was not transparent about plans.
Ms. Fullmer has heavily promoted the Utah City project over the past year. Residents have accused developers of expanding previous plans — going for taller buildings, denser housing units and narrower roads — under her watch.
Council meetings have often devolved into bickering matches between Ms. Fullmer and Mr. Holdaway. But recently, another councilwoman, Mardi Sifuentes, put forward a solution.
On Election Day, nearly 75 percent of Vineyard voters approved a new form of government, adding one more council member and reducing the influence of the mayor, who will mostly vote to break a tie.
“I feel it creates better checks and balances,” Mrs. Sifuentes said.
The rule will not take effect until January 2026, constraining Ms. Fullmer only if she seeks another term. The mayor said she did not plan to run again.
The post In a Growing Utah City, Residents Are Turning Against Their Mayor appeared first on New York Times.
