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Tonya Papanikolas Reporting The trial of former Salt Lake County Mayor Nancy Workman began today and the first person to take the stand was her daughter.
The trial started at 2:00 Wednesday afternoon. We heard opening arguments from both the prosecution and the defense. And then Aisza Wilde took the stand.
In their opening arguments the state said this is a case of standards. They said the mayor had taken an oath to uphold the law and they say she “blurred the line between her own responsibilities and that oath.”
Defense said this is a case of the ball being dropped. They said there was a long line of miscommunication and misunderstandings, but that doesn’t mean it was a cover-up.
Aisza Wilde, the daughter of Nancy Workman, was the first to take the stand. She spoke for almost two hours. We learned that she had worked six months with the employee who first came into this bookkeeping position. That employee was already working part time at eight dollars and hour and Aisza Wilde wanted to keep her and so she had to offer her more money. So she went to her mom to talk about it.
According to Wilde, Workman told her she thought they could loan out employees to other organizations but said, “I’ll have to talk about it with David Marshall,” who was her chief administrative officer. Days later she came back and told her daughter they could do it, but the employee has to do some work for the county. She also said this employee would have to be a community liaison for the mayor’s office.
Now here is what Aisza Wilde said in September: “If we didn’t follow procedure or we did something unorthodox, then that’s a possibility, that we did something unorthodox. But the intention was truly truly to benefit the Boys and Girls Club.”
Wilde said today that she did not know what work these two employees that filled this bookkeeping position did for the county, but when she was asked, ‘what did the county get out of it?’, she replied, ‘the benefit of safer streets and smarter kids.’
We know that these employees were filling out time cards that said they were still part time getting $8 an hour, but actually they were getting $13 an hour and working 40 hour weeks, because the county was paying them $10 and the Boys and Girls Club was paying them $3. So there have been a lot of questions today to Aisza Wilde in respect to how much they were getting and why she wasn’t filling out the time cards with their exact amounts.
We have only heard part of this questioning. The defense will question Aisza tomorrow as the trial continues.
