For the week of January 8 - 14, 2003

What’s Mayor Simon trying to prove?

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With only a year on the job, Ketchum Mayor Ed Simon has shown an impulsive yen for peevish trivial pursuits when he should be showing vision.

This type of behavior is what led to Simon’s 1992 ouster as a city councilman in a recall election—an ill-advised, clumsy attempt to fire Police Chief Cal Nevland.

Now, in his second foray into city politics, Mayor Simon seems to have learned nothing from his first calamity.

Look at the record.

Only weeks after taking office last January, Simon talked of firing City Attorney Margaret Simms without grounds or cause. The mayor apparently couldn’t muster believable grounds for firing her. So Simms is still on the job.

Then, as if to even the score with Chief Nevland for the 1992 recall humiliation, the mayor impulsively hired a Blaine County sheriff’s deputy last summer to be assistant Ketchum police chief without consulting Nevland, who had one of his own officers in mind for the job.

The chief promptly sued, challenging the mayor’s authority. Simon backed down. The city thereafter paid $65,000 in damages to the luckless Simon hireling who spent two days on the job as assistant chief.

Now, as if to manfully prove his prowess to the police department since Chief Nevland’s retirement, Mayor Simon has ordered the department to cancel maintenance services of self-employed computer tech Steve Linden.

Competence was not an issue. Linden’s sins seem to be he was (a) hired by Chief Nevland and (b) as a private citizen wrote a harsh Letter to the Editor of the Mountain Express critical of the mayor’s actions leading to the $65,000 settlement for the botched hiring.

"I don’t want Steve Linden working on these computers anymore," Linden quotes the mayor as ordering the police department. The new chief, Salt Lake City police Capt. Cory Lyman, won’t arrive until Feb. 1.

If Simon’s city council colleagues allow Simon’s thin skin to drive city business decisions, then the mayor might assume he has tacit approval for a new litmus test for vendors and contractors providing services to the city—sort of a makeshift political spoils system.

Would Mayor Simon require private service providers to sign loyalty oaths, forswearing they’ll vote for him, agree with his policies, and not criticize him in public?

Unless Mayor Simon changes his troubling ways, Ketchum faces three more years of mischievous mayoral eruptions that have more to do with satisfying odd personal failings than the needs of a growing city.

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