Pete Prekeges is quick to tell you two things, in no particular order. First, that he loves to talk.
Second, that he’s Greek, and damn proud of it.
Now, as mayor of Ketchum, Prekeges is putting his own slant on his fatherland’s most famous export, and he’s happy to talk about it. “As we Greeks like to say,” he told me in a staccato Hellenic accent, “You’re welcome for the di-mah-kruh-see.”
Since his swearing-in in January, Prekeges’ personal version of democracy has been markedly louder than past Ketchum administrations. Questions get asked, and answered. Those answers are debated, and new questions asked. Meetings run long—that’s the way the longtime restaurateur likes it.
“If you look back at history, people were yelling and screaming at each other,” he said of the government debate. “We don’t need things to be so stuffy. You know, I do have ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’—but I don’t read it.”
Halfway through his first term, council president Spencer Cordovano called Prekeges’ election “the best-case-scenario for Ketchum.”
“Pete’s a breath of fresh air,” Cordovano said. “People feel heard. It’s not like we’re wearing powdered wigs and robes in there. We’re just talking to people. And the results are going to be better for it.”
As the longtime owner of Grumpy’s, the beer-and-burger institution on Warm Springs Road, Prekeges is still adjusting his approach from private businessman to public servant. He reminds himself that the city’s budget is not his money; its policy decisions are not only his call.
Council member Tripp Hutchinson remembers a particularly long meeting early in Prekeges’ term. He looked up from his desk and was surprised to find the council chambers full, citizens engaged—deep into a five-hour meeting.
“They felt like active participants, fully part of the decision-making that’s going on,” he said.
“It’s night-and-day different,” Hutchinson, who’s half-way through his term, said of the new administration. “The entire energy has shifted for the better.”
It helps that Prekeges knows just about everyone in the council chambers—or any room in town. He has 7,500 contacts on his phone, more numbers than Ketchum has people. At this point, he said he has to pay Verizon for extra storage. He goes to four bars a night—though, he’s quick to clarify, he doesn’t drink at four bars a night. He goes to listen. That comes easy after spending more than three decades pouring beers and serving burgers. Prekeges is the guy who bought the bar he was hanging out in anyway—first as a Grumpy’s patron, then as manager, then partner, and, from 2008 onward, as the owner outright.
Inside Grumpy’s, Prekeges’ clown prince attitude—he loves a costume, not to mention a sequined dress—masks a sharp head for business. Grumpy’s may look like a time warp, but there’s a reason it has lasted close to five decades in Ketchum’s revolving-door restaurant scene.
Prekeges is active in the local business community, and it was local business owners who propelled him toward politics. He’s a founding member of the Ketchum Business Advisory Coalition, an advocacy group composed of merchants, restaurateurs and other owners. The group formed to give business interests a voice at City Hall, and it decided to aim for the top office. It quickly ran into an issue, Prekeges remembers: While the members ran businesses in Ketchum, few lived in town. Prekeges himself moved down Valley decades ago, trading a cramped apartment by Trail Creek for a house, a garage and a yard.
He put his hand up anyway. Prekeges ran for mayor and won. Now, he’s back where he started, living out of the exact condo he left in 1998.
To Hutchinson, that business backing belies the mayor’s deeper appeal, and the “big tent” that elected him to office. Prekeges is a “true populist politician,” Hutchinson said. He’s “intensely intertwined with the working class of the town, always has been since he moved here. If you look at what he created at Grumpy’s—the welcoming culture, the packed deck—it stems from who Pete is as a person.”
“You can’t teach this s–t,” Cordovano said. “He understands the community’s character, and he tells it like it is.”
At Prekeges’ core, Cordovano sees a people person—someone who can “bridge the gap” between Ketchum’s disparate constituencies.
“Pete says ‘Please’ to Siri,” Cordovano told me. “I’m 100% optimistic. I’m loving it. I enjoy the work. And whether I agree with Pete or not, I love the conversation.”
These days, the mayor says he wakes up in Ketchum. In the morning, he checks in at Grumpy’s, then heads to City Hall. In the afternoon, he commutes to his old house in Hailey—“Grumpy’s Worldwide Headquarters”—and works on the business alongside his wife. They’ll have a meal, and he’ll wait out the traffic, before he heads north for meetings, more city work, and a sleepy return to the condo on Andorra Lane.
Want to know the whole story, go ahead and ask him yourself. He wouldn’t have it any other way. The mayor is in, and he doesn’t plan on shutting up any time soon.
“Only the good die young,” Prekeges said, “so I’m going to live forever.”