Salt Lake County GOP seeking new leader, consensus
Missteps, infighting have taken a toll on the party
Former state Sen. James Evans seems to be the front-runner for the county party chairmanship against first-time office-seeker Patrick Reagan. Current county chairman Tiani Coleman chose not to seek re-election at the convention, which is scheduled to start at 9 a.m. in the South Towne Expo Center.
While Coleman is not running again because of a pending move to Utah County, a biannual change in leadership is not uncommon for the county party; no chairman has served two terms in a decade. Although each of the chairmen had their own reasons for not running again, or lost a re-election bid, the turnover in the top county GOP job is indicative of the seemingly constant county party turmoil.
And losing the county mayor's race and one county council seat last election, combined with Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson's continuing to win 60 percent or more of the county vote, shows a local Republican Party out of sync in Utah's most populous county.
Here are two examples of county Republican Party leadership missteps over the past decade:
• The county executive committee stripped 11 well-known county Republicans, including former GOP County Commissioner Brent Overson, from their party leadership posts after they publicly endorsed Democrat Randy Horiuchi's 2002 candidacy for the Salt Lake County Council.
Those and other incidents left the then-chairmen explaining their actions and under fire.
With accusations of ethical lapses being fired from the fringes of the party at the current leadership — especially from Mike Ridgway, who has recently been removed from the party's central committee but is running Saturday for county party secretary — it is doubtful that either Evans, who said he is supported by "party insiders," or the Ridgway-supported Reagan will be able to avoid conflicts in the coming two years.
For his part, Evans credits the large, active membership of the county party for the continuing disputes and said they are the type of things which actually make the GOP the more open party. By contrast, Democrats lack the divergent viewpoints and tend to be run in a more "socialist" manner, he said.
"In our party, we have a true democracy," Evans said. "It's messy, but that's how democracy works."
Evans, who won an upset victory in Senate District 1 in 2002, only to see the traditionally Democratic Salt Lake City west-side seat go back to the minority party in 2004, says he has big plans to reorganize and re-energize the county party. However, not wanting to tip his hand to Democrats, he refuses to publicly identify those plans and only hints at making the party "a more integral part" of races.
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