Town Rebels Seek to Erase ‘Fiefdom’ From Utah Map : Politics: A colorful, maverick polygamist runs Big Water. His foes want to disincorporate the hamlet of 400.

How do you get rid of a small-town mayor?

Piece of cake. You get rid of the small town.

Tuesday is Election Day here in Big Water, population maybe 400. It is the day some citizens will try to vote this desert burg out of existence to dislodge its mayor, Alex Joseph, a polygamist-libertarian of outspoken and colorful stripe, who, with some of his nine wives and sundry relatives in official posts, runs Big Water.

Runs it efficiently and by the book, the mayor says. Runs it high-handedly, to his own advantage and like a personal fiefdom, say some unhappy citizens.

“We’re not out to get him. We just want to get him out,” Margaret Tucker says with campaign-slogan neatness.

“A handful of troublemakers cannot disincorporate this town.” says Joseph, an ex-Modesto, Calif., cop, an ex-Mormon who professes to be on a first-name basis with Utah’s governor. “I’ve been run out of four states.” he says, in the voice of one ticking off campaign ribbons. “I’ve had my house burned down twice.”

The Joseph clan came to Big Water in the 1970s, when it was still Glen Canyon City, the remnants of a construction camp for Glen Canyon Dam. The town had flourished with bars and bordellos but by the 1970s its hopes rested with retirement trailers and holiday homes.

It is an unusual setting for a man who is, by his reckoning, descended from a Plantagenet queen, the dukes of Norfolk and Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church. In the Joseph compound, an open-beamed hall is hung with fanciful versions of heraldic banners, dominated by a vast seal inscribed “Alexander I Israel.”

“So we’re outrageous,” Joseph says. “So what? It’s not against the law to be weird in the United States.”

Joseph has been mayor since he led Big Water to incorporation in 1983, reelected since by varying and sometimes disputed margins. One of Joseph’s wives--Elizabeth, the city attorney and newspaper editor--says of the people who called this special election: “What do you do when you can’t play? You pop the ball, so nobody can play. . . . The whole town is suffering for this.”

National tabloids have lapped up the polygamy--banned by the Utah constitution, although enforcement is up to local authorities--and libertarian stuff, further infuriating Joseph’s opponents, many of them retirees, who complain that they came here for “peace and quiet.”

Those are wanting commodities in Big Water. The election is the fever point of an acrimonious civic fray that all Utah is about to witness; the state is sending in election monitors because of citizen concerns about illegal voting.

John Clark, counsel to the attorney general says: “There have been reports of friction in Big Water.”

Friction? Let’s get down to cases. Tales of arson and sabotage and intimidation and fiscal fraud and even an illicit bake sale. Gunfire and sugared gas tanks and slashed tires. Lawsuits and name-calling and nasty phone calls. Dueling newspapers published by two libertarian polygamists who loathe each other.

“I thought we were coming here to live peacefully,” sighs Earl Tucker, a retired businessman from across the state line in Page, Ariz. “I didn’t know we were coming to live in a barrel of worms.” People he knows have already moved out because of it, Tucker says, and people who thought of moving in won’t come.

Chris Cheff, once a Joseph backer, wants to sell his custom hilltop house if the vote to disincorporate loses. “The way things are going in Big Water . . . people feel intimidated. People feel threatened. I’m not scared of Alex Joseph but I just don’t like living here any more.”

The Josephs take family ties to an extreme, their critics say, even in this barely populated desert where such a practice is necessarily common. Two wives are city attorney and city clerk, one nephew is town marshal, a nephew and a son are city councilmen and town contract jobs put out to bid almost invariably go to Joseph kin or friends. They are frozen out at every turn, Joseph’s opponents say.

“There is no city government; it’s ‘Alex Joseph rules,’ ” says Cheff. “He wants control . . . and you better not cross him. He’s got complete power over city government and he wants to keep it that way.”

If Alex Joseph rules, says Joseph, it’s because nobody else is willing to pitch in and do the work, only to gripe and insult him.

“If I wanted to make money, why the hell would I be sitting in this jerkwater town?” he asks.

The town’s budget is just under $50,000. The state auditor has ordered a formal audit of the books because of complaints but “we don’t have any premonition there’s serious fraud there,” says spokesman Tom Allen.

Joseph draws no salary. Among other things, he does publish a newspaper and hold the contract for water billings. No one else had the computer to do it, he says. His wife Elizabeth became Big Water’s city attorney--at about $5 an hour--because no other qualified person would do it so cheaply. Ditto his wife the city clerk. Ditto his nephew the marshal.

“Our friends say the Josephs have the jobs because they know how to do them,” says Elizabeth. “So that’s what we’re supposed to apologize for--that we’ve got the education and the talent?”

In his windowed aerie above the town of trailers and humble houses, Joseph says with a rhetorical sweep as wide as the view: “The job of CEO, that’s what I was elected to do. . . . These people don’t know progress when they see it. We took nothing and are trying to build it into a community.”

His pledged enemy is B. J. Wagener, also a libertarian polygamist who bought land here several years ago, disgusted, he says, at being convicted for fire code violations because tenants in his Los Angeles apartment building refused to keep the fire doors shut.

“Their goal is to take over Kane County, and they’re halfway there now,” Wagener says of the Joseph clan. They will “coerce and harass people out of town that won’t bend to their will,” he adds.

Wagener complains that Joseph “calls anyone who disagrees with him a pathological liar.”

Joseph, obligingly, calls Wagener “a pathological liar.” Delinda, the town-clerk-wife, says that Wagener is “insanely jealous. He wants to be Alex.”

This spring, Earl Tucker began organizing the opposition. “They call us dissidents, but we’re citizens trying to get a decent place to live without fear, and to make sure we have a constant source of water.”

Ah yes. Water. Out here, bigger than sex or politics.

The county is suing Big Water to regain control of the public water system that it now contends the town took over illegally. It has the support of some Big Water residents who say that the system is being mismanaged and who point to a six-day outage over Thanksgiving. Five residents have sued to stop a town order that water meters be installed on every lot, including vacant ones, at $1,000 a meter.

Even the federal Bureau of Land Management has received water bills for its vacant public land and forwarded them with some bemusement to a Bureau of Land Management attorney. “They want to charge us for water use and we don’t use any water,” says the bureau’s environmental coordinator and realty specialist Michael Noel.

Nonsense, says Joseph. The system was mismanaged until he got it, he’s required by law to put in meters, and the money goes to bond debt. And his son, who has the contract for the backhoe digging and installation, gives everybody bargain rates.

More than once Joseph mocked property taxes as legalized theft. But now he has levied one. He blames the people who sued him; the tax money has to go to pay the legal fees, he says.

His opponents call the tax pure spite, a political club to cudgel them. Big Water’s destiny may not be in its water anyway. Under the Smoky Mountain area lies 400 million tons of high-grade coal. In the 1960s and ‘70s, environmentalism scotched plans for a coal-burning plant nearby. But now the Bureau of Land Management is beginning an environmental study of an underground excavation proposed by a Canadian-based company, to dig out more than 2 million tons of coal each year to ship to Japan. Coal could make Big Water very big indeed.

This mayoring stuff is small potatoes, anyway; Joseph has written one book arguing that an ancient Egyptian diagram that relates to “Genesis” is a computer. “I like Immanuel Velikovsky (an author whose scientific ideas were controversial). I like Albert Einstein. I like reading the Bible in Egyptian,” he says. “I spend most of my time trying to be a responsible quack.”

If Big Water disincorporates Tuesday, Joseph should have more time for such pursuits. But his family and his newspaper are loud against disincorporation. The county is “notoriously brain dead as far as government,” says Elizabeth. And without local zoning, the newspaper prophesied, those pig farms will move in. The pigs “will reign in Big Water if we disincorporate.”

The stench, it warned, “will be undeniable.”