Corroon starts right up

Peter Corroon made a powerful statement Wednesday.

The new Salt Lake County mayor-elect demonstrated what kind of administration he's going to run by calling a 9 a.m. press conference, just a few hours after bleary-eyed reporters went to bed after a long election night.

"I tried to talk him out of it, but that's when he wanted to do it," spokesman Russell Kennedy said.

Corroon himself had been up since 5 a.m., his usual time. He went to bed just after midnight, early for a candidate whose race was still very much up in the air. He was content to get the final results the next morning.

"I think that's what people want," he said. "A stable, constant person."

Corroon was, in fact, the one constant in an up-and-down, scandal-plagued campaign season that County Clerk Sherrie Swensen said "will probably never happen again in history."

Mayor Nancy Workman flamed out in dramatic fashion, her Republican replacement Ellis Ivory entered the race as a write-in with only a month to go and was later allowed on the ballot, while independent Merrill Cook faded.

Democrat Corroon, in the race since March, steadily and — to the alarm of some supporters — somewhat quietly campaigned while scandals toppled county officials and other candidates came and went. He called himself "a workhorse, not a showhorse," and backed that statement up with his conduct.

"I am proud of the campaign that we have run over the past year," he said. "We have worked hard."

As for Ivory, he conceded the race in a joint television appearance with Corroon early Wednesday morning, shook Corroon's hand, and officially ended his short, intense election bid that took the race down to the wire.

"I was amazed what he could do in four weeks," Corroon said of Ivory. "It was like a freight train coming towards us."

"I must admit I enjoyed it," said Ivory of his self-financed campaign. "I don't think we could have done anything differently, really. If I won, I wanted to win it with a real classy, high-road approach."

As for Cook, while pollster Dan Jones said the frequent political candidate undoubt- edly siphoned more votes from Ivory than from Corroon, he probably wasn't the spoiler that he has been accused of being in previous elections. Ivory would have had to get more than 19,000 of Cook's 21,492 votes to close the gap with Corroon.

"I think Corroon maybe would have won regardless," Jones said.