After Salt Lake City leaders and state legislators came to a compromise last week on a bill that aims to expand the state’s role in directing traffic-calming efforts in the capital city, the Utah House of Representatives added new language giving the state’s Department of Transportation oversight of all projects that could “impede traffic flow.”
The bill’s House sponsor, Lehi Republican Rep. Kay Christofferson, offered up the amendment Tuesday night. The amended legislation passed 60-14 with mainly Democrats voting against. Only one Republican registered opposition: Rep. Anthony Loubet of Kearns.
“When Salt Lake City shuts down roads, it affects some of the main arterial roads that people in the state use to get to our capital city,” Christofferson argued on the House floor. “... It also affects traffic for our capital city, for the businesses, for a lot of the transactions that are made here.”
SB195 — if adopted as amended — could threaten some streets projects already in the works, including the 400 South viaduct plan and Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s ambitious Green Loop.
Notably, though, the newest version would also give UDOT veto power over any idea that could “impede traffic flow” on any road in the central neighborhoods of the city, meaning new traffic lights, speed bumps and stop signs could be rejected by state officials. As of Wednesday afternoon, the bill was on hold in the Senate as lawmakers and others discussed possible further changes.
The newest version of the legislation keeps clauses directing UDOT and the city to study the effects of traffic-calming strategies — efforts to slow down cars and make streets safer for pedestrians and bikers. It also maintains a specific study area where UDOT will have control: south of 600 North, west of Foothill Drive, north of 2100 South and east of Interstate 15.
However, the new clauses formally expand UDOT’s power over city streets in that area by widening its purview to all city streets, not just major roadways. The inserted language also halts all proposed traffic-calming projects that the city hasn’t hired a contractor for yet.
While the bill did not revert to an earlier version that completely prohibited safer-streets work in Salt Lake City (that version did pass the Senate already), leaders in Utah’s capital voiced renewed opposition Tuesday night.
“It’s like bill after bill after bill after bill here tries to tell Salt Lake City what to do and we always talk about local control,” House Minority Leader Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City, said. “We talk about the federal government not telling us what to do and here we go again, telling Salt Lake City what to do.”
Traffic-calming advocacy group Sweet Streets has been encouraging its members to reach out to their legislators about the bill since it was first released.
“It’s despicable,” Julian Jurkoic, Sweet Streets treasurer and a member of the organization’s board, wrote in a late Tuesday night news release. “Suburban lawmakers — whose experience of Salt Lake City is based on commuting to a parking lot and back — decide that everyone should live like them, having no regard to their own principles of self-governance, small government and limited bureaucracy. If using sneaky language, last-minute amendments and reneging on hard-fought compromises is the democratic process in Utah, it is truly a sad state of affairs.”
More changes could be coming to the legislation before the Senate concurs with House representatives’ edits. If both chambers agree on the bill’s specifics, it would move to Gov. Spencer Cox’s desk.
