In September, while campaigning for re-election, Spokane County Assessor Ralph Baker said he’d rely mostly on personal funds to cover his political costs because he wanted to avoid “the impression that I’m taking money for something in return.”

One person whose campaign contributions he did accept is his chief deputy, Kevin Best, whose 23-year-old son Baker hired last week as his property data manager. After the predictable fallout, young Best was promptly let go.

Still, talk about unfavorable “impressions.” Adam Best was to receive $38,471 a year, which is three steps, and about $5,000, above the normal starting rate. In making the hire Baker sidestepped the county’s human resources office along with a dozen other applicants and defied a county policy against hiring employees who would be under the supervisory authority of a relative.

Baker could get away with all that because he’s an independently elected official and the head of his own office.

Being legal didn’t make it right, however, any more than belatedly undoing it removes the concern. If public impressions matter to Baker as much as he claimed last fall, he could hardly have been unaware that one issue on voters’ minds when they sent former County Commissioner Phil Harris packing three months ago was the fact three of his sons were on the county payroll.

But Baker’s devotion to public interest was questionable enough before the latest faux pas. He had drawn attention earlier in the week over plans to sell advertising on the assessor’s official Web site. That raises the same kind of quid-pro-quo concerns Baker contended last September that he wanted to avoid.

Baker says he would underwrite the Web site by selling space to the highest bidder, probably real estate companies. It’s the same site he deactivated in October after news reporters from KREM-TV used it to establish that several properties in Spokane County were escaping taxation. That after rearranging his office so people would use the Web site instead of dropping by in person.

Pulling the Web site angered both the assessor’s office employees – whom he implied had sabotaged the records to hurt him politically – and real estate interests who relied on the Web site in their work. Folks in the business already had a quarrel with Baker’s earlier decision to archive old assessor field books in Cheney, making them inconvenient to access for information that sometimes isn’t available elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the Adam Best hiring reportedly had others in the office riled up again. “People are blown away,” is how a departing information system technician put it.

And not just employees. County Commissioner Todd Mielke, a fellow Republican, got so tired of complaints from people who thought the assessor worked for the commissioners that he backed Baker’s opponent in last fall’s GOP primary.

Of Baker’s latest head-scratcher, Mielke made his point obliquely, telling a reporter: “I would leave it to the readers to consider whether a 23-year-old would have significant experience to be able to jump steps in the pay scale.”

By readers, of course, he means you.