This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Former Salt Lake County Republican Party chairman James Evans is stuck in Groundhog Day. The partisan bomb thrower is beginning to look like the Boy Who Cried Wolf — on steroids.
Evans filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Salt Lake County mayor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Peter Corroon, an action that looks like the latest product from a political recycling program.
Evans alleges in his Third District Court complaint that Corroon has skirted county finance laws by raising more money for his political action committee than is allowed by county ordinance for individual contributions. He alleges that Corroon's campaign has threatened contractors and lobbyists who represent them with withholding future county contracts unless they make campaign contributions.
The key here is that Evans doesn't name those contractors and lobbyists, which may be why Evans filed the complaint pro se instead of getting a licensed attorney to file it for him.
Attorneys I talked with doubt the complaint will go far. But based on Evans' history, that probably doesn't matter. Evans has made a habit of last-minute allegations and formal complaints against Democratic candidates in an attempt to besmirch them in the days before the election. Once again, Evans made sure the news media had copies of his complaint before he filed it.
When Evans was county chair of the party four years ago, he complained to the Salt Lake County Clerk's Office that Democratic district attorney candidate Sim Gill had violated campaign reporting laws by not listing all the occupations of all the donors listed in his report. Gill countered that they were compiling the occupations as quickly as they could, but did not have them all when the filing deadline was at hand.
Evans then blasted Democratic County Clerk Sherrie Swensen for supposedly being too permissive toward her fellow Democrats. He later complained on talk radio that Swensen was not forthcoming with information about precinct boundary realignments, which made it difficult for Republicans to know where their neighborhood caucuses were being held. This allegation was made at the same time Evans was boasting of record attendance at the caucuses.
The kicker in 2006, though, was Evans' attempt just days before the election to peddle to television stations a doctored video showing Democratic Salt Lake County sheriff's candidate Jim Winder conducting a training exercise with deputies. The video seemed to show that Winder was a racist. But the video had been edited to eliminate Winder's explanation that he was roll-playing a racist cop to show the deputies exactly how not to act.
Last-minute complaints and lawsuits have been tried before. And they have been successful.
In the 1980s, when Democratic Salt Lake County Treasurer Art Monson was neck and neck in the polls in the state treasurer's race with Republican incumbent Ed Alter, a mysterious plaintiff filed a last-minute lawsuit alleging that Monson had violated campaign reporting laws. The lawsuit eventually was dismissed, but not before it damaged Monson enough that he lost the election.
Such questionable use of the courts is not limited to Republicans.
The GOP is still simmering over the charges that Democratic District Attorney Dave Yocom brought against Republican Salt Lake County Mayor Nancy Workman for alleged misuse of public funds. Workman was found not guilty by a jury, but the charges cost her the election.
By the way, the unlikely victor in that mayor's race was Peter Corroon.
E-mail Paul Rolly at prolly@sltrib.com