Nettled Nickel-Nipper

Less than five months after he scored an astonishing political comeback, Salt Lake City's peppery Mayor J. Bracken Lee was beyond doubt the most unpopular man in town last week. University of Utah students hanged him in effigy, crowds booed and hissed him at city commission meetings, both Salt Lake City newspapers rapped him, and irate citizens set up in front of his house a burning cross inscribed, LEE, YOU ARE A FOOL. Reason for the outbursts: Lee had highhandedly fired respected Police Chief W.

Cleon Skousen, 47, FBI veteran and Mormon Sunday-school teacher, who has run a model police force for 3 1/2 years.

Lee tossed around vague charges that Skousen had been "insubordinate," but Skousen's real offense seemed to be that he had failed to show enough enthusiasm for Lee's determination to slash the police-department budget. Any interference with his nickel-nipping crusades stirs J. Bracken Lee, 61, to fuming anger. Sometime Republican Governor of Utah (1949-57), Lee ranks high among the obsessive budget-cutters of U.S. politics, keeps on his desk a paperweight inscribed G--D--TAXES. Since taking over as mayor last January, Lee has, among other things: P: Refused to pay a $29,000 bill from a Chicago firm that, by Lee's reckoning, overcharged for parking meters bought by the previous city administration. "Tell them we'll pay $8,000," said Lee to the city attorney, "and if they won't settle for that, they'll have to sue." P: Canceled the $2,000-a-year "contingency fund" provided to cover the mayor's out-of-pocket expenses, thereby shamed the four other members of the city commission into giving up their own $500-apiece contingency funds.P:Sliced a fast $258,500 out of the previous administration's final bud'get, vowed to whittle away $250,000 more. P:Forced the resignation of the city purchasing agent because he bought $10,000 worth of water pipe without asking for bids. (Lee drew brisk criticism by naming his own campaign manager as the new purchasing agent.)

P:Fired the city's public-relations director on the ground that "if a city government is any good, it doesn't need a pressagent."

Brack Lee's cranky passion for cutting budgets and taxes makes him a hero to some Utahans, a crackpot to others. Back in 1956, top Utah Republicans decided that then-Governor Lee was a "disruptive influence" in the party, wrecked his hopes for a third term. Lee took revenge in 1958 by running for the U.S. Senate as an independent, gathering so many normally Republican votes that able Republican Arthur V. Watkins lost his Senate seat to Democrat Frank Moss. With the state's Republican organization unforgivingly angry at him, Lee seemed politically dead--until he ran for mayor of Salt Lake City last year as an independent and won.

Last week, in view of the hisses, hanged effigy and burning cross, Lee once again seemed a politician without a future. But then, Brack Lee had proved before that the man with the black-ink figures can often have the last word.

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