‘Trib Talk’: Mayoral candidate Erin Mendenhall pitches a Salt Lake City with more trees, buses and neighborhood shops

The race to be the next mayor of Salt Lake City is down to two candidates — city Councilwoman Erin Mendenhall and state Sen. Luz Escamilla.

In part 1 of this month’s “Trib Talk” podcast, Mendenhall describes her vision for a city with more trees, walkable neighborhoods on the east and west sides, a range of housing and transit options, and new businesses.

A transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, is included below. To listen to the full interview, click the player above or search for “Trib Talk” on SoundCloud, iTunes and Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify and other major podcast platforms. A transcript of Part 2, with state Senator Luz Escamilla, can be found here.

For more on the Salt Lake City mayor’s race, including both candidates’ policy positions on the inland port, transportation and affordable housing, visit sltrib.com/slc-mayor-race.

Benjamin Wood: I’m Benjamin Wood, joined today by Salt Lake City Councilwoman Erin Mendenhall, who’s running to be the next mayor of Salt Lake City. Today we are sitting in Liberty Park and, Councilwoman, you chose the location, any particular reason?

Erin Mendenhall: This park is our city’s backyard. It’s the heart of the city. Sugar House Park is bigger, but Liberty Park is really the city’s regional park. And three of the community councils that I work with surround this park. So it’s been at, literally, the heart of many issues over the years, but it’s also just a beautiful place to sit in the morning. So thanks for joining me here.

BW: Of course, thanks for having us out. I mean, you don’t need to twist my arm to get me to sit in the park on a sunny day. I’ve got a list of topics here, but to start off I wanted to begin with something that’s dear to my heart. I’m on record as despising the Salt Lake City flag and I’m curious, what is your position on a potential redesign?

EM: Did you participate in the survey earlier this year?

BW: I did participate in the survey.

EM: So you know that you’re not alone in despising the flag. The city recognizes — I think I can say — that it needs some updating and some changes. I participated in the survey too and I’ve yet to see the results of all the input.

BW: Same. I’ve been asking and hopefully soon.

EM: Let’s get it going. I think it would be really appropriate, because it would be illustrative of the changes that I see that I’m going to make happen here in Salt Lake City. And I hope we’ll be able to get into some of that vision in our conversation today. But yes, it is time for a new flag, Salt Lake City.

BW: Now, the easy answer is that we need a new flag. The harder answer is what that flag might look like. Do you have any ideas for what you’d like to see on a flag?

EM: One of the questions on that survey you’ll probably remember was what kind of symbols or imagery illustrates to you Salt Lake City or symbolizes Salt Lake City. And of course I’m biased, but I think that our City Hall is one of the most emblematic images of Salt Lake. The mountains of course, they cut through 80 different cities along the Wasatch Front and farther. So yes the the mountain skyline but gosh our City Hall is pretty cool.

BW: So maybe something that uses that?

EM: Yeah. The U.N. was just here last week and their conference symbol had a nice outline of our city hall tower with a rainbow circle around it. Now I’m not saying we steal the U.N.’s image but I thought that silhouette looked pretty good and it made me think of our future flag. We’ll see, who knows. But the people will probably decide this.

BW: All right. So if I understand correctly, you were not born in Salt Lake City but you’ve lived here for quite some time. Tell me a little bit about your background, what brought you here and perhaps more importantly what kept you here?

EM: My parents are from Philadelphia and rural Illinois. They ended up in Arizona. And I was born in Arizona, lived there until I was 7. My father was diagnosed with cancer a little bit before that. And he worked for a company traveling worldwide quite a bit of the year and didn’t want to travel so much once he had that diagnosis. So he found a job up here in Salt Lake City with a company that I don’t think is here anymore, Eaton-Kenway, and still traveled but not so much and not overseas.

He survived until I was just shy of 14 years old. I went to Alta High School and about two days after I graduated, I moved with two of my girlfriends into a basement apartment in the 9th and 9th Neighborhood. And I’ve basically lived in a mile, mile-and-a-quarter, mile-and-a-half radius around my first apartment in the 22 years since then.

BW: And what was it that kept you there for so long?

EM: The same thing that drew me there in the first place, which was the character, the walkability, the big tree-lined streets, coffee shops, the fact that I could live and work and play and go to school all within a walk, bike ride or a bus route. Now that affordability that I had even needing to share a basement apartment with two of my girlfriends is really not here in the city anymore.

I’m 39 years old and and I hear from people, my age and older, ‘Why do we need to talk about affordable housing? I didn’t get assistance when I was going to school. Why can’t kids going to school today afford that?’

And the truth is, the marketplace has shifted quite dramatically and that natural affordability just isn’t there anymore. But that’s not what you were asking about Ben, sorry to derail to a policy section.

BW: You teased out several questions there that I have on my list anyway, so I want to come back around to that in a bit. But first off I wanted to ask a question, as city mayor you’re kind of in a unique place politically in the state.

On the one hand you’re the administrator of the state’s largest city, where people live work, play, recreate, walk around, bike around, etc. You’re also an elected leader for a group of voters who are the lion’s share of the state’s liberal voters in a state that is largely conservative, which gives you a political megaphone.

Obviously you’ll be doing a bit of both, but if you were to pick one of those two hats to typify your personality, are you the city administrator or the city advocate, the city representative?

EM: That’s a good question and because I came up from such a grassroots background of nonprofit and community organizing, I think in my heart I’m an advocate for the community. But in looking at the scale and the job of mayor of the capital city it would not be serving my neighbors if I wasn’t walking out there as their advocate at the statewide and at that broader partnership level every single day. So my background is in community organizing. My future, I hope, as our mayor, is in bringing far more resources and partnerships to the table so we get more as the political pendulum swing from the rest of the state that we so pride ourselves in being.

We don’t live in an island, we know that. And issues like the inland port in the state Legislature make that abundantly clear that we aren’t here by ourselves and we frankly aren’t safe all of the time. And so how our relationships are, what we’re not just willing to work on in terms of putting out fires and addressing critical needs, but working proactively on doing things like building a tech ecosystem in our city. That would benefit our residents, that would benefit the minimum wage, the bottom line of so many people who live here — the affordability — and then make it easier for us to do things like get our bus fleet on the ground here in Salt Lake City, make sure that’s an all-electric bus fleet and be able to live, work and play here affordably again.

BW: I told you how I wanted to go back to some of things you had mentioned. You spent most of your time in the city living on the east side. It’s a recurring criticism of administrations past and present that the two sides of the city are perhaps treated differently, perhaps inequitably. I’m curious, do you share in that criticism, yes or no? And is there a need to address the two halves differently at all? What does the east side need? What does the west side need?

EM: I’ve been in City Hall for six years and I’ve been there as we finished the west side master plan where, for really the first time, instead of saying ‘Listen community we’re working on a plan for your area. Come on in to City Hall at 7:00 on a Tuesday night and tell us what you think we should do.’ Instead, the city went out into the community and met in the community spaces, listened at that level in the neighborhoods. And I think that was the beginning of more effort that’s been going on. With the 9-line master plan that’s been happening, the 9-Line redevelopment area through the RDA, another west side investment that is coming very shortly to that part of that community.

But absolutely there is a history of racism, classism, concentration of poverty and investment in that concentration in our city’s past. And today, and frankly in the last six years while I’ve been there, what I’ve been trying to push and the dialogue I’ve been trying to develop at the city level, is about geographic equity. It’s about access. I do not want to continue to perpetuate an us-them narrative. This is a Salt Lake City narrative.

Yes there is conflicting history, there is racist history. There was redlining in our city, where banks wouldn’t lend to people in certain neighborhoods. Of course, now that’s illegal. But the reality of zoning and the impacts of what that did at the time still play out in our neighborhoods. So absolutely there is inequity. Yes there are environmental justice issues.

I’m announcing an initiative where I’m committing as our next mayor to plant 1,000 new trees each budget year on the west side of Salt Lake City. We know we need to produce less pollution. But we also need to take more pollution out of the air. And the environmental justice reality of the west side is that they have more pollution than the east side of the city. And that plays back to where did we concentrate industry? Which way does the atmosphere flow, too? Some things we can’t control, but there’s a lot we can. Trees not only produce oxygen and take pollution out of the air, but they fix carbon dioxide and that’s an investment that increases property values, increases walkability, can decrease crime in neighborhoods and makes places more attractive to live in. So there’s a lot we can do as a city to remedy the history that has played out to inequities and disproportionate access in this city.

BW: You mentioned the walkability of the 9th and 9th Neighborhood. I live on the west side and to get downtown from my house I have to cross train tracks or the freeway. There are literal barriers that stop the west side from reaching the east side. How do you get around that? And then once we’re downtown, big wide streets, lots of cars. How do you help people get where they’re going?

EM: Yeah. If you had said ‘let’s meet by my house for breakfast,’ it would be hard for us to come up with a place to go get coffee. My husband’s from the west side. Our daughter was born on Emery Street, at home actually, and we intentionally wanted to anchor the beginning of her life in the Glendale community.

That’s an aside. Access is the issue and, as you know, living on the west side that freeways and rail basically boxes in a huge portion of our community. So bridges are one way that we create better access. It’s also a very expensive endeavor, which we’ve been successful at to some degree. But transit is one of the other ways that we can do it. Just about a month ago, our very first circulator buses hit the ground here in Salt Lake City. Did you notice them yet?

BW: I have. I live nearby 9th West and I did notice the squeak of the brakes more often than I had before.

EM: Well I hope you noticed the benefit of it too. We created a transit master plan and the nut shell of it is UTA looks at where everybody coming in and out of the city and our residents go. And we wanted to look at where do Salt Lake City residents go and where, if we paid for bus service, would we make the biggest impact in helping people connect west side to east side, jobs to play, etc.

The first phase of buses just hit the streets at 21st South, 9th South and 2nd South. And I’m proud of the fact that that was a plan that I championed as a new council member. Years ago, we finished up the transit master plan and then last year when I was the chair of the council we worked to create the funding to actually implement it. So many master plans end up sitting on a shelf without any money, but we asked residents ‘What do you want us to invest in?’ And they said loud and clear, affordable housing, safer neighborhoods, better streets and better bus service.

Those first buses are there, but going forward we have two more phases to implement and they are expensive. And Salt Lake City residents should not be shouldering that cost on our own. This is where partnerships with some of the bigger entities in this community need to come to the table. I know from listening to folks at the [Salt Lake] Chamber and [the Governor’s Office of Economic Development] that when they’re talking to investors from out of state or out of the country about coming in here, bringing a business here, making some big investment, if it’s not the first question, it’s the second or third question they ask. What is your transit system like?

It is one of the integral pieces that the city really has the plan for. We absolutely know what we want to do, but it benefits that larger ecosystem. And I’m working currently on ways that we can partner with those big investors from the state to the business community, universities and others that want to benefit from us being able to get out of our cars. So it’s a long way around saying ‘access, access, access.’ We can control the buses actually, we can decide that the bus is going to go over this bridge instead of having to go straight down 9th South and stop at the tracks for three minutes to 17 minutes, you never know. But also developing the economy over there in a way that serves residents in a way that they don’t have to leave the neighborhood to get their groceries. You need a big grocery store over there. You’ve got Rancho. Where do you shop at?

BW: The Smith’s for the most part.

EM: Yeah. 9th and 8th?

BW: Yes. So you mentioned buses, you mentioned bridges. You mentioned the 9-Line corridor and some of the trails that are going in. There is an expense there, you’ve mentioned that. We like to talk about these partnerships, but we don’t have any guarantees yet. If it were to come down to taxes or these projects, where do you fall?

EM: I fall to the community. What do you guys want us to do? And we asked that question last year with the Funding Our Future conversation. When the state, in locating the prison in the city, gave us the option a few years ago to do a 0.5% sales tax increase and we didn’t act on it until last year. And that’s when we said to the community, ‘Do you want us to do this? And if you want us to do it what do you want the money to be spent on?’ That’s how it would be going forward.

BW: But if I could go back to where we started, going back to this east and west divide. If you ask the city ‘Hey, what do you think about building a bridge on the west side?’ The east side might not want to pay for that. Bridges or buses or whatever it may be.

EM: If we’re talking about a system approach, which we are with the public transit. That’s something that we did through a sales tax increase. Now, we’re not going to do a sales tax increase anytime soon but when we look at a single project like the bridge just north of Fisher Mansion that connected that final gap on the Jordan River Parkway Trail.

BW: I use it all the time.

EM: Thank you very much. It’s a beautiful bridge, isn’t?

BW: It is. It gives you a good view of the city.

EM: Someday I’ll tell you a great story about how we got that bridge and Senator Mike Lee. But when we look at a single project like that, as a bridge is, then we’re talking about federal grants.

We should be talking about grant money, not about raising taxes to pay for a bridge. There are transportation grant moneys out there called the Build Grant, used to be called The Tiger Grant, which is how we paid for the majority of the S-Line, the Trax into Sugar House streetcar. But that’s where we need to be. It’s not about raising taxes. It’s talking about what are the other funding solutions.

More locally, as you remember last year, the county activated a transportation option. And there are transportation grants at the county level now that we can and should be aggressively applying for. We can even do those in cooperation with other cities. If we want to talk about extending the streetcar from Sugar House where it is today down into Millcreek into the Brickyard area, Oh, you better believe we’re going to be applying with Millcreek. It’s going to be a joint application, which makes it stronger. When it comes to the federal dollars, there’s tens of millions of federal grant dollars out there that we could be applying for more aggressively and that’s how we get to doing the bridges and those big capital projects.

BW: Let’s pivot a little bit. Before the primary I went around at the Groove in the Grove and I talked to residents about what they’d like to see the new mayor focus on. A lot of different things were mentioned but probably the No. 1 thing that came up was crime, public safety. I’m wondering what is your personal read on the current level of crime in the city and what approaches would you like to see the city take to address whatever that level may be?

EM: That’s a sentiment I mentioned a minute ago that we heard from, yes, the west side of the city but throughout the city, including a lot of District 5 where we felt the outflux of Operation Rio Grande. Here in Liberty Park, in our alleyways, in our local neighborhood parks, we’ve seen some increases in crime.

Now, I recognize every time I talk to the [police] chief he reminds me that crime has been decreasing. It’s still decreasing. But I’ll tell you that we cannot underestimate, and we should not underestimate, the impact of violent crimes in a neighborhood or home invasions. So while we could look at data and say ‘Yeah, crime is on the decrease,’ when you have an increase in homicides — as we have in the Ballpark area over the last couple of years, or home invasions, which did spike for a time over the last couple of years in certain areas — that is so detrimental on the neighborhood psyche.

So it wasn’t surprising last year when we said ‘What do you want us to spend the money on if we do that increase?’ People said more patrol officers and proactive policing. Last year we gave the police department funding to hire 27 new officers. This year we completed that funding commitment with 23 new officers funding a total of 50 new patrol officers. And Chief [Mike] Brown is doing that with intention, which is to build neighborhood beats again. We haven’t had that kind of officer who knows a couple blocks, the neighbors know the officer, they know who and what the issues are on an ongoing basis and it creates a proactive approach instead of putting out fires and running around the city because there simply aren’t enough officers. I also want to recognize that not everyone feels more safe with a police officer on their street.

BW: I was about to bring that up more cops isn’t always — not everybody thinks that’s the way to go.

EM: That’s right, absolutely. And I also want to mention that I don’t believe arresting our way out of bad circumstances or areas that have a lot of crime is the solution for that area.

It’s really about empowering the community, investing in a community or allowing the kind of investment that creates a sense of ownership, empowerment, strength, safety, walkability and makes neighborhoods feel great and awesome. That’s part of the way that the Redevelopment Agency comes in, working with the community to say, ‘What do you want here? What kind of businesses do you want to see here? Do you want a child care center here? Do you need a coffee shop? Do you need big grocery store? Do you need jobs that you can walk to?’ And each and every project area is different.

We look forward to the 9-Line project area being implemented. The west side master plan, which is a different tool the city uses, is underway. But there’s one more piece of this, which is qualified opportunity zones and we don’t have to get into the weeds on that.

BW: Maybe give us the layman’s term version of that.

EM: The layman’s term is that the federal government created — is creating, it’s not actually completely finalized yet — but has identified areas. Locally we identified them, submitted them to the Treasury and these are areas of the city — they are throughout the state actually, but there are some in the city and a lot of them on the west side and the downtown area — where investors can defer their taxes, basically, by investing in a qualified opportunity zone.

They have to hold that investment, so they can’t flip it. And they have to also — when it comes to housing in particular — invest as much money as they bought the thing for in the first two years. So they have to make significant improvements and then hold that and maintain it.

What we’re learning in this very early stages of qualified opportunity zones is that cities who sit aside and just let the investment happen without getting in there and bringing whatever little city incentives they can to get the kind of development they need, they may not necessarily be positive investments that are happening. Or they might not benefit the community the way the community needs it to. So what cities who are being smart about it are doing and what Salt Lake City I believe is working on currently but haven’t seen it yet is an investment prospectus that helps to bring some city assets or some ways to make their investments work easier. We’re going to work with you in your permitting process and in exchange we want you to — and I’m making this up as just one way we could go about it — in exchange we want this kind of a business or this kind of housing infrastructure investment.

BW: I think that will bridge nicely to my next question, which is about affordable housing. But first, we saw with the recent city council vote on the project on the northwest side that there is some skepticism toward that kind of incentive, that kind of tax break offered to big investors and developers. To the everyday family who might say ‘Why are we giving these investors a break when I’m trying to buy a house that I’m going to not flip, that I’m going to be living in,’ what would you say to those critics — people who don’t like the idea of tax incentives?

EM: Well I need to clarify something. I’m not sure if you or if everyone in the community who spoke with us about that understands that it actually isn’t a tax break.

They’re going to pay the taxes just like everybody else. And on that project in particular, north of I-80, there’s no infrastructure out there yet. There’s no streets, there’s no utilities, there’s no street lights. And the developer, through a contract that Mayor [Jackie] Biskupski negotiated with them, is going to do all of that public infrastructure work.

They’re going to build the streets. They’re going to build the utilities up to our codes and under the oversight of the city. And then after it’s completed, they will turn over the ownership to the city. And as the county comes through, as they do with our homes and businesses every year, and assesses what’s this property worth now compared to what it was worth last year, it will inevitably be worth more money, right? As you build something the property value increases. So they’ll be paying more taxes on that. And what we will be giving to them is a portion of those future taxes that they’ll be generating through those investments.

BW: And I take your point it’s not a true [tax] break. But I think in colloquial terms, when we talk about tax incentives, it is a financial benefit offered to somebody willing to put in that initial investment that isn’t necessarily available to the everyday person.

EM: Right. And thankfully the everyday person doesn’t have to build streets, street lighting and necessarily lay the big main line of sewer down the middle of the street in order to build their house.

BW: Sure.

EM: That’s the reality of what the businesses in the northwest quadrant, where there is nothing, are facing. I don’t think it’s about defending the development that’s happening in the northwest quadrant. It’s about defending the city’s position to have any authority over what happens up there. And for us to say no to an agreement that was executed, really, years ago by the city and these property owners would have opened the doors to the Inland Port Authority taking over 7,000 more acres of our city than they have today. And that’s not something I can ever defend.

BW: The question I wanted to pivot to was affordable housing. You mentioned how the ability of people to get with their friends and buy an apartment in the city is getting harder and harder and harder. To buy a house, harder still. What do we do about that? What can we do about that?

EM: We know we need a whole spectrum of housing types. We need apartments to single family homes. We even need tiny micro apartments that are ultra-affordable because of their small footage. And just bedrooms, which are the single room occupants, or SROs, that the city is talking about right now, where someone has their own bedroom but, say, six or eight units share a kitchen or a bathroom.

We need a whole spectrum of housing types and at some end of the spectrum, some of that is talking about people who are currently experiencing homelessness and need access to affordable and possibly case-supported housing, all the way up through my mom, who is retired and on a fixed income, whose property taxes are rising as all of ours are over the years, and is looking at really not being able to afford staying in a home. I think it’s important that we not necessarily blur all the way into this is the solution for homelessness and all the affordable housing we’re talking about is about homeless individuals needing housing. It’s really everyone in our community. I have lived in this city through different stages of affordability in my own life from being a student a couple of times, being a single parent for a time. We need affordability for everyone and we need it actually to be across the city. So how do we do that?

Part of the way is the ongoing funding that we’ve created last year again back to the funding our future. We’ve set aside a portion of the sales tax to fund programs that help people get into housing like downpayment assistance or helping people stay in housing. About half of the renters in Salt Lake City are paying too much for their rent. And what is too much? More than 30% of your income is too much. And we say it’s too much because if something happens like you break up, or you lose your job, or you get in a car accident, it’s going to be very difficult for you to make that rent payment the next month. So we’ve created programs that help people and work through nonprofits that are already doing this to help them be able to get a voucher or have some assistance to keep their housing.

We know it’s cheaper to help people bridge those occasional gaps than it is to force them through an eviction process into homelessness, case management, trying to put their lives back into a stable housing situation. So that’s a piece of it, but then cooperating and leveraging our precious tax dollars through private investment.

As you know, we’re adding more multi-family units in Salt Lake City than any other city in the state of Utah. Fourth south, Sugar House, all over the city you’re seeing these complexes go up. How do we get more affordability built into those? That’s already happening. That’s where, about two and a half three years ago, I put together a $21 million dollar pool of money. I cleaned out the couch cushions of the RDA budget and proposed it to my peers on the RDA board and they unanimously supported making this big affordable housing pool of money. It had never happened in the city before.

That’s where the blue ribbon commission came in. The mayor put together a group of developers and experts to say ‘how can we get the most out of this?’ At this point we have put out about half of that money and leveraged it about 10 times over with private investment. We’ve had about 1,500, approximately, units come online in the last several years from the investments we’ve made.

But I’ll tell you — with that next half of money going out and with the sales tax revenue that’s more for programming — we’re starting to recognize, or at least I feel like, we could really get more out of that same amount of money in the future. We flung the doors pretty wide on affordable housing at Salt Lake City. I’m proud of that and that’s really what we needed to do. We’re in the crisis. And yet we need to be judicious about that money.

We need to keep coming back to the table with the investment experts, with the developers to say, hypothetically we got 10 units out of this deal we negotiated. Could we have gotten 20 out of it? How can we work better together to get more and to get longer affordability and deeper affordability out of the money we have in the future? So we need to continue working at the table with all those of investors. And anytime that we can make our tax dollars go 10 times farther with private investment that’s a good thing. Investing in, or rather having a policy conversation about, inclusionary zoning is another one of those options that we should be talking about.

BW: And what do you mean by inclusionary zoning? For people who don’t spend their time at the Planning and Zoning Commission.

EM: Oh, who aren’t policy nerds? I thought that’s what this podcast was.

BW: Of course all of our listeners are policy nerds, but so they can explain to their friends.

EM: Inclusionary zoning is a legal action, so an ordinance that a city can take and cities all over the country — or different cities around the country I should say — have put together inclusionary zoning policies, which requires some percentage of affordability in new multifamily housing, either citywide or in a transit corridor. And transit corridor is sort of a relative term too. At this point does it just mean rail lines, like tracks and streetcar? Or could it mean bus rapid transit lines? Or could it mean lines that Salt Lake City has guaranteed through a contract with UTA that they’re going to run for us and they can’t change next August. So [there’s] some relativity in there.

But where do you require it, if you require it? Is it 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent, and then how do you work with those developers to actually make it pencil for them? That’s where the cities end up coming really acutely, financially to the table. Of course there’s federal tax credits involved, typically.

BW: I wanted to make sure we talked a little bit about air quality. You have a background in that issue, you’ve been involved in a number of different entities focus there. It’s a recurring topic. Of course here in the Wasatch Front, we have the inversion, we have the ozone particulate levels. We also have a ballot initiative currently calling for cleaning the darn air. As someone who has worked in this area, what are the things that could work and how do we do them?

EM: Yeah, the air quality issue is why I’m in politics and it’s my background with the nonprofit sector and cofounding a nonprofit. Today, I chair the state air quality board and it is absolutely the lens through which I see all of the issues we’ve just talked about and every other issue in the city.

I think that there’s a lot of strategic advantage to figuring out how even housing discussions or infrastructure upgrades can help us benefit our air quality. But, more pointedly, Salt Lake City has a wonderful electorate of people who want us to do something and who want to participate in doing something. We also know, at the same time, we’re growing all along the Wasatch Front.

Is there a way for us to catalyze the momentum of growth and the investments of growth to go faster on the air quality initiatives? I say absolutely yes. And the transit investment is one of the biggest and most beneficial ones to everyone that we can start working on together. We don’t have to lift this ship by ourselves as taxpayers. If we do it’s going to take us too long. As we grow a transit system that is accessible to more people, I don’t think that anyone should be believing that we’re going to build a Salt Lake City where no one has a car, no one ever drives. Part of the reason we live here is these amazing mountains nearby and the national parks we like to escape to. So just the attractiveness of the region we live in, we’re going to have cars.

But if we can make it easier for you to go to the grocery store or the gym or even get to work every day and back where it’s cheaper and more convenient than driving your car. Yes we can do that. We absolutely can. Building that network out is a piece of it. Making sure that those buses are electric buses the way that Park City has in their system, that’s another thing we need to expedite. Building out our electric vehicle charging infrastructure, making it easier if you do drive an electric vehicle like I do, which is not a Tesla — I’ve never driven a Tesla — but making it easier to park, charge and get around the city, there’s a lot of grants out there for us to be able to do that actually.

And even small things like a lawnmower and snowblower exchange program. On the air quality board where I sit, we get to hear the reports of how the website crashes when they open up that lottery. People can apply to be able to bring in their dirty snowblower, dirty lawnmower and get an electric one from the state government. It’s so cheap, relatively speaking, for the amount of emissions it removes from the air. We need that kind of program here in Salt Lake City.

It sounds little, but on the Division of Air Quality website you’ll see that using a snowblower for one hour produces as much emissions as a new vehicle driving from Salt Lake City to New York City. It’s an incredible amount of pollution right after we’ve cleaned out our airshed with a storm and we fire those things up and — there it is.

There’s a lot of things we can do all the way up to that climate change level, which I think is the No. 1 issue we’re facing as a worldwide community, and that’s with our coal-fired power plants, in part. In 2020, our Rocky Mountain Power contract is up. We get to start negotiating that next year. Your next mayor will be negotiating with Rocky Mountain Power. I want to be that mayor. We need to have those renewable energies here by 2023 and that’s something that Ralph Becker started negotiating — 2023. We ended up with 2030. And it’s time for us to renegotiate that sooner. Thankfully those coal-fired power plants aren’t here in our airshed, they’re farther south in the state. But they’re absolutely producing the kind of carbon that we need to get out of our atmosphere. And that is a climate change conversation.

BW: I want to ask you some city hall questions. When Mayor Biskupski was elected she faced some criticism for her approach to reshuffling the deck in City Hall. She asked for many department heads to resign.

EM: 111.

BW: She countered that it’s common for there to be some turnover, but other people felt like she had gone a little bit beyond what might be common. But I wanted to ask what your approach would be. If you’re elected, how would you approach staffing and filling the roles in city government?

EM: Yeah, I know a little bit of what you’re talking about.

BW: I would imagine you do.

EM: I was there. I was there when all of this happened and 111 people were asked for their letters of resignation.

BW:It sounds like you’re saying that was a lot of people and more than you would have expected.

EM: That is a lot of institutional knowledge and skill that is gone. We have rebuilt with a lot of great people in our departments and divisions today, but we were without a lot of knowledge in that in city hall administration for some time. I think it’s a poor approach to take.

Surely, there is some moving of administrations and a different direction. And I think that kind of assessment happens after your first day in office, not before you walk in the doors. I think that the people who are running our departments and divisions today, by and large, are incredible people. They have been working very hard to do good for the city. And I would like to walk in there and say, ‘Tell me what your big, bold idea is. Tell me what you are hungry for support to be able to execute, to do the work that we’ve hired you to do even better, or to empower your employees to go further with what they’re doing for the public.’

Let’s see what those big ideas are. And let’s see what it would take of an administration to support that kind of ingenuity and tenacity in Salt Lake City. We have some huge issues here. We always have. If you go back and listen to mayoral interviews over the many, many campaigns of the past, there’s a lot of recurring themes of helping people who are experiencing homelessness, even dealing with our air quality, taking care of our streets, public utilities, water. And surely these kind of themes that will continue. But we need to make sure that the employees we have working on these issues have the tools they need, the support they need and, frankly, the education and the collaboration with cities around the country so that we aren’t inventing the wheel and we can go further with the people we have. I want to see what they have in their back pockets.

BW: On your list of endorsements there’s a few of your colleagues on the city council. Of course, they’re also up for election this year.

EM: Some of them.

BW: Have you endorsed anyone or are you planning on endorsing anyone in the city council races?

EM: That’s a good question. I think I’ll leave it for my council peers to ask me for their endorsement.

BW: So as of now, you have not endorsed in those races.

EM: No. Actually, I think I gave Charlie Luke my support but I don’t know that he’s used it. And I will say that all of my council peers encouraged me to run, every one of them. And I’ve sat in our City Council meetings lately and seen the mayor’s desk empty as it often is in both our formal meetings and our work sessions. Last week there was no one there in our formal meeting. And I look forward to being not only present, but having true collaboration with the City Council.

There is a natural tension and an appropriate balance between those two branches of government. But, Oh my gosh, what an opportunity of catalytic energy to be able to work together, to agree to disagree sometimes, which is what we do on a day-to-day basis as council peers, and then keep working. Because you’re not there for yourself, you’re there for the city. You’re there for your community. And I think we need a mayor who has a temperament and a tenor of working and work ethic that is really about Salt Lake City and our residents and can leave your personal needs and your personal frustrations aside and just get the work done. There is no room for big egos.

BW: You had mentioned for a second there, that there’s not going to be a Salt Lake City where no one has a car. That’s not realistic. But it made me wonder what your vision — or what what you might perceive as the future of Salt Lake City — might be. So as a last question, how might you describe what Salt Lake City will look like in four years if you are elected mayor?

EM: Salt Lake City, in my vision in four years, is a place where it’s easier and more fun, frankly, for you to not take your car wherever it is you’re going in your day and there’s a usable, affordable, accessible bus route or other transit option for you to get in and around our city.

It’s also where 9th and 9th west is full of economic vitality and vibrancy. And when someone says, ‘Let’s meet for coffee at 9th and 9th’ you have to ask ‘Is it the East Side or West Side?’ We are on track to get there, but it’s going to take the intention of an administration that also knows how to use private investment to get those kind of initiatives and stark changes happening in our city.

I want Salt Lake City to be a place where there are green trees and lush neighborhoods from the west side to the east side, north to south, where there are local business nodes that are supporting the kind of the life and lifestyle that families, single people, the tech community, investors and older people want to live around. Where you can get together and you know your neighbors and it creates a safe environment that’s also supporting itself economically.

I want to see a tech sector here in Salt Lake City. One of the first things I’m going to work on is getting together with the universities and the business community to create a vision, bringing our tools to the table to say how do we create fertile economic soil here where those great entrepreneurial minds on the hills of Research Park can put these roots down here in Salt Lake City? And we can have the highest paying industry in the state thriving here in our city. There’s six unicorn companies between Draper and Lehi. There’s not one in Salt Lake City. Half a billion dollar companies and we don’t have one of those tech companies here. We can. We know that their talent lives here and they’re out commuting to Draper and Lehi every day because they want to be in the cultural center.

We have what it is going to take. We have to have the mayor with an intention and really the skill set of bringing those partnerships to the table.

“Trib Talk” is produced by Sara Weber with additional editing by Dan Harrie. Comments and feedback can be sent to tribtalk@sltrib.com, or to @bjaminwood or @tribtalk on Twitter.