SLC mayor reveals what she wants to do with Smith’s Ballpark

After a landmark year of huge development projects and winning a second Olympics, Mayor Erin Mendenhall is now vowing to drill down on what she says matters most to residents: improving public safety, fixing streets and adding affordable housing and green spaces.

While unpredictability and rancor may swirl around its borders, the mayor said Tuesday night in her yearly State of the City address that “Salt Lake City must remain a place of stability.”

“Our core values include a deep belief in the dignity of every individual,” she said in prepared remarks delivered at the Main Library’s newly renovated atrium.

“This will never change,” Mendenhall said, “and our strength as a community lies in our connection despite our differences.”

Now a year into her second term, the mayor also announced city officials had picked an adaptive-reuse approach for Smith’s Ballpark — a plan that will keep a portion of the stadium at West Temple and 1300 South standing as part of a transformative mixed-use redevelopment with housing, entertainment, park areas and other attractions.

Salt Lake Bees owner Larry H. Miller Co. moved the team to a new stadium in South Jordan’s Daybreak last year, leaving about 13.5 acres spanning the ballpark and an adjacent parking lot up for redevelopment — and residents worried about their future.

The vision for reusing parts of the stadium also includes building a wave of new community amenities for that south-central portion of the city, long identified as lagging behind on key metrics of health and social well-being.

“The Ballpark neighborhood,” Mendenhall said, “will be a place where families grow, businesses thrive, and the community’s pulse beats strong, drawing us all back to one of the most historic neighborhoods in Salt Lake City.”

Backing for unions, focus on ‘the present’

Several community advocates said Tuesday they had preferred the reuse scenario over designs that would have kept the ballpark intact or demolished it entirely and turned the area into a larger corridor of green spaces.

Mendenhall said more details would emerge this spring, and that the stadium’s adaptive reuse represented Salt Lake City investing “in the places that bring people together.”

During her speech, the mayor stood up for the city’s unionized workers, who make up about 60% of all Salt Lake City staffers, amid a bid at the Utah Legislature to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights. Whatever happens with HB267 now advancing on Capitol Hill, Mendenhall said, “it will not strip away my commitment to treating our workers fairly, to competitive compensation, or to equitable benefits.”

As she acknowledged that last year′s winning of the 2034 Winter Games for Utah’s capital and the city’s approval of a new multibillion-dollar sports, entertainment, culture and convention district downtown around the Delta Center consumed a lot of City Hall’s attention, the mayor promised to put her focus on “day-to-day” matters.

“Here in Salt Lake City, we are doers,” she said. “My focus is on Salt Lake City’s present. Because the Salt Lakers of today need and deserve a city that dares to take action on the challenges we face right now.”

“No matter the tone of the voices in Washington,” she later added. “No matter the topic du jour on Capitol Hill here in Utah.”

Improve public safety

Perceptions of heightened crime, vagrancy and encampments on city streets — along with a demand from Gov. Spencer Cox and legislative leaders that the city bolster its strategies for dealing them — have made public safety “one of our most urgent areas of focus,” the mayor said.

Twelve days ago, the city unveiled a plan to offer property for a temporary 1,000-bed shelter and step up police patrols and surveillance in problem neighborhoods such as downtown, Ballpark and along the Jordan River.

Mendenhall said the Salt Lake Police Department had boosted arrests since the plan took effect, while noting that some shortages in shelter capacity, vital social services and jail beds are issues that Utah’s capital city cannot fully address alone.

“Emergency shelters are overburdened, while treatment facilities and transitional housing are stretched thin,” the mayor said. “These gaps — every gap — in the system leads back to the streets.”

Still, she called the safety of residents “non-negotiable.”

“We will no longer tolerate a system that is broken and perpetuates harm upon our residents,” the mayor said, vowing to detain more lawbreakers among the unsheltered, who represent an outsized share of yearly jail bookings.

“We will hold ourselves accountable for our parts of the system,” Mendenhall added, “and we will be up front about the systemic gaps that fail to hold people accountable and provide the assistance to stability that many need.”

But the city’s approach, she said, will remain nuanced and won’t blur homelessness with criminal activity, instead treating the worsening problem “as a humanitarian crisis.”

“Addressing the needs of those living on our streets,” she said, “requires empathy, precision, and a relentless focus on solutions that prioritize their humanity, while ensuring the safety and well-being of the entire community.”

Add more housing

Salt Lake City lacks as many as 18,000 affordable housing units by some estimates, as residents find themselves increasingly cost-burdened by housing.

Against that backdrop, the Mendenhall administration has seen 6,567 new affordable units added since 2020, when the mayor took office — all of them bolstered in some way by public subsidies now totaling over $122 million.

The mayor said she would seek another $5 million to that end in this year’s budget.

She revealed that The Other Side Village, a city-backed hub of tiny homes built for unsheltered Utahns near Redwood Road and Indiana Avenue, will expedite creating at least 200 additional homes over the next year, well exceeding its pilot goal of 85 homes.

The mayor also unveiled a new online tool that lets residents and policymakers track the city’s steady advances in affordable housing.

The online dashboard, to be operated by the city’s Community and Neighborhoods Department, gives a detailed view of numbers and types of units, their locations, funding sources and more — and will be updated quarterly.

“Every unit we build,” the mayor said, “every dollar we invest, and every policy we implement moves us closer to a future where affordability isn’t out of reach.”

Expanding, improving parks

Mendenhall said she has made “tangible progress” in addressing severe imbalances in the spread of park spaces across the city — and ensuring those spaces are “safe, clean and welcoming to all.”

That has included fleshing out plans for a proposed Green Loop by converting car-centric streets into walkable open spaces, the mayor said. Portions of her public safety plan call for an integrated system of security cameras in high-volume areas, she noted, as well as security services after park hours to ensure curfew compliance.

New pickleball courts, Mendenhall said, are coming to the west side along with the redevelopment of the 17-acre Glendale Regional Park, the west side’s answer to Liberty Park.

As part of the Green Loop downtown, the mayor said she will request $3 million toward designing a refresh for 200 East between City Hall and the Main Library block that will turn the stretch into a “Civic Campus.” The goal, she said, was “integrating people-first design with green space and trees, lanes for walking, biking — and yes, even some cars — and new recreation opportunities.”

“You’ve asked us to do better, and we will, because public spaces aren’t just about infrastructure,” the mayor said. “They’re about community.”