This morning's Standard-Examiner has a truly odd Scott Schwebke story, showcasing a couple of trivial complaints, evidently eminating from the Boss Godfrey 2007 re-election campaign machine. We incorporate the lead paragraphs below:
OGDEN — City Councilwoman Susan Van Hooser has been asked to stop using the city’s internal e-mail system to solicit support from municipal employees for her mayoral campaign.And here is mayoral candidate Van Hooser's quoted response:
City Attorney Gary Williams wrote in an e-mail to Van Hooser, obtained by the Standard-Examiner, that the city’s e-mail server has received numerous e-mails from her campaign addressed to municipal employees.
“I encourage you to update your campaign e-mail address list to avoid use of the city e-mail system for political purposes,” Williams wrote to Van Hooser.
Van Hooser said her campaign did not intentionally send e-mails to city workers while they were on the job. “They are between a rock and a hard place (in supporting candidates for mayor),” she said.Bulk emailing can be tricky at best; and according to the Ace Reporter Schwebke narrative, some 55 city employees apparently did receive Van Hooser campaign-related emailings on two occasions, in the course of the organizing of a fund-raiser, and in the announcement of last week's mayoral debate. Yet the Van Hooser campaign's error in this regard (if any) would seem to be entirely innocent and inadvertant, inasmuch as her campaign staff actually sent these emails to Dave Hardman's Ogden/Weber Chamber of Commerce email list, and not to city employees as a distinctly "targeted" group.
The e-mails were sent out en masse to Ogden/Weber Chamber of Commerce members, some of whom also happen to be city employees, Van Hooser said.
Van Hooser said she has since deleted the workers’ e-mail addresses to prevent them from receiving future materials from her campaign.
The about to be out of a plush job Mr. Williams announced that he's ordered preventative action, to "avoid" violation of the ordinance which prohibits the direction politically-oriented emails to city employees:
City code prohibits elected officials from engaging in political activity aimed at municipal employees in the workplace, Williams wrote to Van Hooser. The city council’s staff has adopted a policy to reject and refuse to disseminate all political campaign e-mails it receives to avoid violation of the ordinance, Williams said in the e-mail.And the question we ask is this: Does this preventative measure apply to all politically-oriented emails, including those transmitted by the Chamber of Commerce itself, and the Bobby Geiger operated Lift Ogden Gondola Cult organization? Both of these organizations are heavily into political email lobbying, as many of us are well aware. And for all intents and purposes, each of these political activist organizations is an agent for Boss Godfrey.
And what about the city employees themselves, who have apparently voluntarily placed their workplace emails on the Chamber of Commerce (and perhaps other) non work-related lists? Shouldn't Mr. Williams also issue these employees an admonishment, demanding that they remove their email addys from non work related lists? It would seem to us that each of these employees has the affirmative obligation to remove their city email addy's from any and all political lists.
And moving onto the lower section of the Schwebke article, we find this:
In a related matter, Williams told Van Hooser he has received a complaint that she has used Art Stop Ogden’s facilities and staff to disseminate campaign literature.We'll be danged if we know what this complaint is all about. Perhaps some of our city hall insider readers can help us out with the "real" argument.
“The allegation is that this is wrongful because Art Stop is a city-funded facility, staffed by the city’s contractor,” Williams wrote in the e-mail to Van Hooser.
Van Hooser said campaign flyers were distributed to some art galleries on 25th Street and somehow ended up at Art Stop.
Take it away, gentle readers.
