Bill Paddleford: 1952-2008

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

By Ben Cannon

Teton County Commissioner Bill Paddleford, a champion of the valley’s working class and a steady voice of fiscal conservatism during the last decade, passed away Monday night. He was 55.

His death followed a months-long battle with renal cancer.

Paddleford, who grew up on a Lander ranch, had deep generational ties to Wyoming. He said in an interview last October that his family ribbed him over the years about his move to Jackson Hole, a socially anomalous Wyoming community often the butt of the joke throughout much of the state.

A graduate of the University of Wyoming, Paddleford lived with wife, Lisa, in his beloved “Hoback Nation,” a south Teton County community that some say feels more like the Wyoming beyond Jackson Hole.

“He definitely felt the need to represent working-class people,” said Andy Schwartz, who chairs the county board. “You could always count on Bill for sound reasoning and logic. I always waited to hear what he had to say.”

A fiscally conservative Republican on the majority Democratic board, Paddleford had in the last year taken a strong stand in favor of affordable housing with the contentious but inevitably doomed Osprey Creek and then Teton Meadows Ranch subdivision proposals, arguing for the need to “protect human habitat over wildlife habitat.”

Elected to the county commission in 1996, Paddleford first served eight years on the board. During that time, he co-founded the Clean Snowmobile Challenge, a watershed design initiative that helped transform snowmobile industry standards for sound and air pollution.

“He helped plant seeds and mobilized people across this nation to work toward solutions as opposed to sitting around whining about them,” Leland Christensen, a county commissioner, said of Paddleford’s work on the CSC.
Paddleford was elected again to the county commission in 2006 and returned to the board in January of last year.

In September, doctors at St. John’s Medical Center discovered a recurrence of renal cancer in Paddleford. He went to Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City for prognosis and returned to work a few weeks later optimistic about the future.

“A lot of people look at life as an event and it’s not: it’s a process,” Paddleford said at the time.

Commissioner Ben Ellis considered Paddleford a close friend, though the two were often at opposing sides of political debates.

“Our disagreements would never be anything but cordial,” Ellis said, adding, “It’s a very sad day for me and my family.


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Bill Paddleford: 1952-2008 | Planet JH News Article: General News

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