When Winston Lee of Lee Music heard Tuesday from one of his piano students and their parent that they would go to Heber City’s Tuesday meeting to support his cause and defend his shop as he asked them to, he was confused. He hadn’t asked them to.“They said, ‘Oh, it’s your Facebook post,’” he said. “I said, ‘What Facebook post?’ I knew nothing about it.”Turns out, the circulating photos of an email with his signature was actually written by Jami Hewlett, a longtime Heber City resident, alternate member of the Planning Commission, and current candidate for Wasatch County Council Seat D.Jami Hewlett, running for a seat on the Wasatch County Council, said she thought she had permission to circulate a Facebook post as if business owner Winston Lee’s. He blamed himself for not being more clear that he did not approve of that. She said she had sent the email to Lee before circulating it online, and had thought she had his approval for the message.“I am reaching out to you with an urgent plea for support,” the photo of the email read. “Tonight, the City Council is voting on a proposal to rebrand our street into a ‘festival street,’ a decision that threatens to destroy not only my building but also the livelihood of everyone who works here. Shockingly, no one from the City Council or the Planning Commission has discussed this plan with me, nor with the neighboring building owners.”The message also asked for people to attend the mentioned council meeting with a firm stance against the city’s plans.The roots of all this started about a week ago, Lee said.“She came into my business and she talked about how they were going to tear my business down and got me a little bit scared about that,” he said. “I contacted some of the city entities, and they all reassured me that nothing was going to happen to my building, and, in fact, that my building was going to be a great part of the new development if the new development in fact happens.”With the reassurance, he largely dropped his concern and carried on, business as usual.“I wasn’t interested in fighting one way or the other,” he said. “I don’t get involved in that sort of thing.”Tuesday morning, he got a text from Hewlett. She’d written an email for him that she wanted him to send out to all of his students.“I said, ‘Thank you,’” Lee said. “That’s where I take responsibility, because I didn’t know what was in the email. I hadn’t read it because I was hurrying off to work.”After he read it, he decided not to send the message anywhere but the trash.“I’m like, ‘No, I don’t like the content of this, and I didn’t write it,’” he said. “It’s weird that she put my name on the bottom of it.”Looking back, he wishes he would have been clearer with Hewlett that he didn’t intend to take a position.Instead, he found the message presented online as though he wrote and approved it.As soon as Lee realized what had happened, he reached out to Hewlett.“I sent her a text, and I said I do not want my name being used,” he said. “I said something like, ‘I should have been clear with you, but I’m neutral.’”Since then, he said the two have discussed the situation.“She is convinced that my building is going to be torn down,” Lee said. “I don’t really know why she’s done what she did, but I think that in her mind, she thinks that she’s helping me. But she’s definitely not going about it in a way that would make me comfortable.”He doesn’t want other people using his name, he said, especially to support messages that he doesn’t agree with.Lee believes she also sent emails directly, though Hewlett said she only dispersed the message through the Facebook screenshot.According to Hewlett, Lee had been aware of the potential pedestrian alleyway and was already concerned when she came into his shop to create content for her TikTok channel, jamihewlettforheber.She decided to write the email for Lee and disseminate it on social media after learning the council was scheduled to name the potential pedestrian walk Tuesday evening at a meeting she’d initially been interested in for its discussion about a pending annexation in the North Fields.“I was like, ‘Oh, here’s a letter that you can send out to your piano students,’” she said. “He said, ‘OK, thank you.’ Then I was just going around telling some people about the meeting for the annexation, and I just included the letter.”After hearing from Lee, she worked to take down the posts displaying the email.“I had no ill intentions of forging a letter,” she said. “I love Winston. I would never do something that he didn’t want me to do. It was just a misunderstanding.”Though Lee said he didn’t appreciate what she did and “she better not do it again,” he’s not on bad terms with Hewlett.And though Heber City Chief Parker Sever confirmed the case was reported to his department, he said Lee isn’t interested in pressing charges but wanted the posts down. If Lee did want to pursue criminal prosecution, Hewlett’s actions could potentially have constituted a Class B Misdemeanor, though that would be up to prosecutors to decide.“I called up Jami and I explained to her about what she can and can’t post,” he said. “I told her Mr. Winston would like that post removed, and she told me that she would remove it.”However, the recompense between Hewlett and Lee did not stop the false message from affecting the City Council once it was unleashed to the whims of Facebook.Heber City spokesman Ryan Bunnell — who presented the potential name of the possible future walkway to the council Tuesday — said the email’s effects sat in the room with him and in the countenances of the people it brought into the chambers.“Council was reluctant to make a decision on naming the street because of that information campaign that was launched by that particular individual,” he said. “There were a lot of awkward pauses and glances going around in the meeting and some political posturing.”He didn’t know about the false letter at the time and was confused as to what was happening.“I found out afterwards,” he said. “This individual had taken it upon herself to basically create a big scare over what’s just not true.”Naming the path, he explained, did not solidify the project but just gave people something to refer to when discussing it.He said the walkway has long been a part of Heber City’s Envision Central Heber plan, and he specified that — even if Heber City can get other local governments on board with its community reinvestment agency funding method — its proposed projects will be a long-term pursuit.With potential heavy profit incentive, he said, it’s likely businesses would want to sell given due time and if the plan is funded and implemented.“There might come a time in the next 20 years where (Lee) decides he doesn’t want to be doing Lee Music anymore. In that event, he might want to sell his building. In the event that he decides to sell his building, because all this zoning is in place and this vision is in in place, he’s probably going to get a really, really nice check for it,” Bunnell said. And if Lee never wants to sell his business’s building, Bunnell said he won’t need to.“He could sit on it,” he said. “You could be that guy that decides, ‘I’m just going to hold out.’”He also referred to comments from other city leaders in saying there could be a pedestrian alleyway without knocking over a single building if needed.“The intent of the city is that if we do our job as a municipality correctly by setting up codes, zoning and presenting a plan of how we’d like to see this implemented, private sector will do its own thing,” he said.The post Errant social post ignites confusion over Heber City downtown project appeared first on Park Record.