Weber County GOP exec blasted for comments criticizing county employees
OGDEN — An executive in the Weber County Republican Party struck a nerve during Tuesday night’s property tax hearing when he suggested that Weber County employees might have less motivation than their private sector counterparts to work efficiently.
James Couts, Weber GOP vice-chairman, shared budget numbers he’d crunched with county officials and said he’d identified areas where employee costs had risen but productivity had declined.
“The thought we have that people who work in governments don’t work as hard as the private sector seems to be fairly true,” Couts told those gathered at the Weber Center to discuss a proposed 22 percent property tax increase that the commissioners ultimately pared back to 21 percent.
Couts also pointed to the county’s sharp double-digit rise in employee benefits over the past decade.
Courtesy of James Couts
This file photo shows Roy resident James Couts when he ran as a write-in candidate for Weber County Recorder/Surveyor in 2014. Now vice-chairman of the Weber County Republican Party, Couts riled county officials and employees during a tax hearing Tuesday.
“There’s been some terrible mismanagement in the past. You’re not beholden to the county employees, you’re beholden to the constituents who elected you and I think their opinion is pretty clear,” he said.
His comment about government workers evoked an emotional response from Lance Peterson, director of Weber County Emergency Management and Homeland Security,
“I’m one of those lazy county employees that Mr. Couts referred to,” Peterson said Tuesday night. “I’m a human being and I’ll be damned if I’ll sit here and listen to those kinds of insults. As vice-chair of our Republican Party, I think he should be called out and resign for those kinds of attitudes.”
Peterson detailed his experience during Weber County’s flood five years ago.
“In January of 2011, I had a heart attack and had four stints put inside my heart. And four weeks later, I was in the middle of the night sandbagging people’s homes and pumping them out. I’ve responded to more floods in this county than you can count,” Peterson said, adding that he voted for commissioners to represent him, not Couts.
“I appreciate you guys taking on this tough issue,” Peterson told the commissioners. “I don’t want to pay more taxes, but if that’s what it takes to be able to deliver the services that citizens demand and expect, I’m happy to do that.”
BRIAN NICHOLSON/Special to the Standard-Examiner
In this Jan. 20, 2015 photo, Lance Peterson, director of Weber County Emergency Management and Homeland Security, spoke during a Utah State Department of Environmental Quality hearing at the Weber-Morgan Health Department in Ogden.
Commissioner James Ebert blasted Couts for his “ideological assumption about government employees, waste and ineffectiveness,” noting that he and other officials had worked to make cuts, terminate employees and find more efficient ways to deliver services.
“To come up and say carte blanche that you’re all lazy, you’re all inefficient, you’re wasting our money, it becomes a diatribe that’s very difficult to listen to when we’ve done so much and we continue to do so much,” Ebert told Couts Tuesday.
Reached by phone Wednesday, Couts said his purpose Tuesday was to speak against the tax increase, and that he never intended to personally offend anyone.
“I certainly did not use the term lazy in referring to them, and did not mean to imply that any one individual was lazy,” Couts said. “My father was a city engineer for nearly a decade — he coached my basketball and baseball teams when he was a city engineer because he had the time to do so. He didn’t make much money. That was the trade-off.”
Couts described himself as libertarian-leaning in that he’d like to see government run more like private enterprise in terms of efficiency and size.
“I have tried to look at the budget from the other side, and I understand they feel strapped. But I believe there are places to trim,” Couts said.
On Wednesday, Couts emailed Weber County Republican delegates to recap Tuesday’s meeting and apologize for offending anyone. He also said he tried to catch Peterson and apologize to him in person as Peterson exited Tuesday’s meeting.
But he has no plans to step down from his Republican Party position.
“A resignation at this point would not be fair to the delegates, because it would cause an emergency meeting within 10 days and people would have to get together during the holidays,” Couts said. “I only hold this position until the convention in April. I told delegates that if people want me to resign, they’re absolutely encouraged to show up and vote against me.”
Contact reporter Cathy McKitrick at 801-625-4214 or cmckitrick@standard.net. Follow her on Twitter at @catmck.
