A 65-year-old Kalama man has been accused of rigging a rental home with hidden cameras and building a “secret viewing area” to spy on people for sexual gratification.

Paul Clair Stickel, who ran unsuccessfully for Kalama City Council in 2003, appeared in Cowlitz County Superior Court on a summons Tuesday. He was booked on suspicion of voyeurism and released.

A woman who was renting Stickel’s home at 6310 Old Pacific Highway South told Kalama police in March 2008 that she discovered vents in the house that appeared to have been modified to hold cameras, according to a police report. Police served search warrants on the home on three occasions in April 2008, including once with Stickel’s consent.

Investigators said they found a “secret viewing area” in the house that was built to look into a shower.

In addition, Kalama police said they seized a videotape of Stickel standing in the shower and “occasionally looking up toward the camera to see if it was visible behind the false vent.”

Stickel lost his 2003 city council race by a wide margin to Chuck Hutchinson. During the campaign, Stickel proposed solving the area’s drug problems by bringing drug offenders into the middle of the Columbia River at night and forcing them to swim ashore if they didn’t provide their dealers’ names.

“There are alternative methods for how in the world you curtail the thing,” he said at the time.

Stickel told The Daily News shortly before the election that he was a semi-retired carpenter who graduated from Central Catholic High School in Portland in 1962. He also said he was separated from his wife.

Stickel said in court Tuesday that he plans to hire a lawyer out of Texas to represent him in the case. He is scheduled to appear in court again on Aug. 18.