The Utah Highway Patrol created a tow truck feud in northern Utah. Now the patrol needs to fix it.

Here’s how it happened:

The patrol traditionally contracts with eligible county wrecking companies for “non-consent tows” — DUIs, drivers cited for lack of insurance and unpaid taxes, for instance. The UHP employs a rotation to spread its business as fairly as possible.

Because it’s so rural, the patrol only used two companies in Morgan County.

But after 33 Weber County towing companies petitioned the UHP in early 2015, the patrol announced it was combining Morgan and Weber. UHP brass said they’d revisit the arrangement again in a year.

It’s been a year, and Lt. Mike Loveland, UHP commander for Weber and Morgan counties, said he doesn’t have enough data to return to the 2014 towing boundaries.

“We’ve decided to leave it the way it is for now,” Loveland told Mark Saal, a reporter for the Standard-Examiner. “Things are working adequately, and we’re not to the point where we need to change it.”

That rubs Dale Winterton the wrong way. Winterton owns two Morgan County towing companies, and he’s in the UHP rotation.

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Allowing Weber wrecking companies to join the Morgan rotation would cost him $70,000 a year, Winterton estimated last spring. Staying open beyond 2016 looks impossible.

He wants the patrol to go back to its 2014 towing boundaries. If it doesn’t, he told Saal, he intends to sue.

UHP officials brought this on themselves.

When it combined the Morgan and Weber towing districts, the patrol expanded required response times from 20 minutes to 30. But when Loveland concluded the new system is working, he based his decision on anecdotal evidence — only a fourth of 2015’s UHP wrecker calls recorded the wrecker’s arrival time.

Loveland says Weber response times to Morgan County calls are adequate. Winterton says the patrol can’t possibly know and accuses it of fudging the data.

Determining if troopers are falsifying reports would require an independent investigation. But he’s right about one thing — the patrol can’t verify if wrecking companies hit their marks on 75 percent of UHP calls in 2015.

Why? Because the patrol asked tow truck drivers to record their own response times.

That’s changing, Loveland told Saal.

“Prior to storing our own information, there was a lot of incomplete data,” Loveland said. “So we’re trying to clean that up now and get more data to make an educated decision on this.”

The patrol needed to make an educated decision at the end of 2015. Not the start of 2017.

UHP officials made a change that cost Winterton money, then could not provide data to justify their decision. No wonder Winterton wants to sue — which, by the way, leaves Utah taxpayers on the hook for the patrol’s defense.

Collect the response times for UHP wrecker calls in Morgan and Weber counties. Build a public database. Show you’re making a decision based on facts.

It’s what the patrol should’ve done from the start.