The contract had expired, and while the Davis County Commission had signed on to renew the contract, the lieutenant governor’s office didn’t sign it and send back an executed copy until March 19, 2024, Whitesides explained.

“And so my concern as a county and as a taxpayer voter is that the county was doing business on behalf of the lieutenant governor’s office without an actual contract in place from Jan. 2, which is when candidates usually start to file,” he said.

“And then it could be a couple weeks, depending on how quickly they gather signatures and the amount of signatures they turn in at any given time. Through a GRAMA request, those first signatures were turned in on Feb. 7 by Blake Moore’s campaign … and so my concern is that we were essentially as a county operating without that contract in place, which could create a lot of problems later down the road.”

Whitesides said the county should have declined to receive statewide signature petitions until the contract was in place.

Ryan Comer, Standard-Examiner

Whitesides acknowledged that he doesn’t know and didn’t request the number of how many signatures were collected before the contract was in place but said it’s about there being an operation without a contract in place.

In explaining why this particular issue is so significant to him, he said it’s a big lift for the county.

“The county will bring in temporary employees to help process those,” he said. “I think in 2024 it was more than 300,000 signature petitions that they processed. So when you think about presidential races, statewide races, even U.S. Senate races, all those are flowing all through the Davis County clerk’s office. And so … even though … I’m pretty sure the lieutenant governor’s office would have still reimbursed the county …  you’ve heard the saying that, ‘Well, if there’s not a contract, if there’s no agreement, then it’s their word against mine.’ And I’m not saying that extreme of that would have happened, but to put the county in a financial position to where they didn’t have a contract in place to receive reimbursement for the amount of hours, temporary employees, time spent on doing that signature verification, again, just raises a question that we probably should have had better controls in place, again, to protect the voter and the taxpayer.”

Election integrity

Whitesides said there’s a lot of stuff on social media, especially in the national media, and that “we all have to just take a pause and do our own kind of due diligence to understand” what’s happening, but that election integrity “is very important.”

He likes what the Legislature has done over the last couple years “to kind of beef up those protections or beef up those processes to where you have less of a chance of having issues with chain of custody, process controls, transparency.”

But he added that he thinks there are things the county clerk can do beyond what the state minimum requirements are.

“For example, when the signature petitions come in during that first part of the election cycle — right now, if you’re a statewide candidate, the lieutenant governor posts those on their website — who’s gathering signatures, how many they’ve turned in and that process,” he said. “I think that, as a county clerk, I would institute that on the county level as well so that people could see.”

He said the day-to-day resident may hear when someone files and when someone has made the ballot but not the process in between.

He also spoke of providing more information between the time ballots go out to election day.

“So I think that’s also important, too, to provide to the public maybe on the landing page that, ‘Hey, we’ve received X amount of ballots through the mail,'” he said. “When they go and pick up from the dropboxes, early voting is June 16 through the 19th … information to show, ‘Hey, we’re trying to give you as much information we have,’ things that I don’t think have necessarily been done effectively previously.”

Education and career

Whitesides has a bachelor’s degree in professional sales from Weber State University and a master’s degree in business from Marylhurst University.

He spent about 18 years at the Utah Division of Emergency Management. While there, he did work related to disasters, citing significant rainstorms in 2005 and 2011 in Southern Utah.

“And essentially, my job was to be an advocate on behalf of those communities, help get them funding that they qualified for, but then to also go back and audit those things and ensure that the monies were properly allocated for, that the program was followed, and then in many cases where there may have been either misappropriation of funds or the program wasn’t followed, to actually ask for those funds back from that government entity,” he said.

While working at the Utah Division of Emergency Management, he worked as a financial analyst, an internal auditor, a financial manager and a bureau chief.

For the last four years, he said he’s worked for Rocky Mountain Power “working outages from storms, wildfire issues and currently working in the public affairs department.”

Auditing accomplishment

While working for the Utah Division of Emergency Management, Whitesides said he had helped create a monitoring program, which he called “essentially an auditing program” – before it was a thing for the federal government to do.

This program, Whitesides said, was basically a guidance to let counties know what they would be looking at when they came in to audit.

“This is what you need to remember that these things are allowable under this year, but then the following year, they are not,” he said. “These are the things that can be spanned over multiple years. And just giving them guidance so that at some point in the future, when they would be audited by the federal government, they would have all their ducks in a row. And so I feel pretty proud of that. I think we started that probably around 2004, 2005, and it’s just kind of proceeded through. And I think, for the most part, Utah has been a pretty good standard for that particular grant funding that comes through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”

Outsider status

Whitesides is a political outsider, having never run for office. He said that means he comes in as someone who will say all policies are on the table to be looked at to see if they benefit the taxpayer and the voter.

“And if not, what can we do within the law, within the current existing laws and ordinances of the county to change that, to make things more accessible, to provide more information, and to not limit ourselves just to what’s required by state law,” he said.

He also said not being a politician is a strength because he’s not worried about a reelection.

“If I end up winning and being a one-term clerk, then that’s the will of the people,” he said. “But I think also my auditing experience allows me to come in and look at things from a different perspective and really look at it objectively and say, ‘What are things we can do to, again, be more prudent stewards of taxpayer resources, of elections,’ and finding that balance between providing accessible information and also ensuring that there’s privacy for people’s information.”

Transparency

Whitesides said a feeling from residents of not enough transparency was the biggest challenge facing the Davis County clerk.

“So, for example, again, going back to the contract we have with the lieutenant governor’s office, the contract specifically states it will reimburse us for hourly work,” he said. “When I say us, the county, for hourly work, for temporary workers, for their hiring. Doesn’t specify if it takes into account any of those fringe benefits. If you have an exempt employee who’s setting aside their day-to-day job and then coming over and doing that, and then instead of overtime an exempt employee accrues leave, and that leave is usually a liability on the balance sheet as you carry it over until they actually start using it, just like paid time off or their annual leave. And so it doesn’t really answer those questions. I think the response we’ve received is we’re fully reimbursed, but we haven’t been given any additional information to show that that is the case. So I mean, that’s one example.”

He also talked about information from contracts done during commission meetings being provided to the public.

“It’s probably about three clicks deep on the website to get to that,” he said. “And then … they’re mainly in PDF files, and so to be able to search for … what the county’s doing in terms of landscaping maintenance, like who’s the contract with, and how much are they paying him? I mean … you have to know when that meeting happened, you kind of have to know when that agenda item and what happened to be able to even find that.

“So I think some of those things could be resolved just by working already within the systems that exist and pulling certain data sets out and having those just be part of the landing page on Davis County.”

Closing statement

In his closing statement, Whitesides said the election comes down to whether or not voters are happy with the way things are.

“If you want change, if you want to see things more accessible, if you want to see a greater focus toward transparency and to looking at being judicious about county resources and somebody who is new, who is not worried about whether it’s one term or two terms – I also believe in term limits – then vote for me,” he said. “Again, I care about Davis County, I live in Syracuse, I’m a fifth-generation Davis County resident and, honestly, I’m doing this because I want to bring more transparency to the county.”

For more on Whitesides and his campaign, visit https://www.jonaforclerk.com/

Contact Standard-Examiner editor Ryan Comer at rcomer@standard.net.