Salt Lake City avoided the worst possible outcome of the annual state legislative session, Mayor Erin Mendenhall said.
“We went into the session with the goal of preventing a state takeover of our public safety,” she told reporters Friday afternoon, “and we succeeded in maintaining that core function of Salt Lake City.”
Still, the mayor said, a host of bills narrowly focused on Utah’s capital sought to control the city on a “punitive level.” In total, City Hall lobbyists tracked 345 bills, and 253 of those will have tangible fiscal consequences for the city, she said.
Despite the intense spotlight on Utah’s capital, Mendenhall praised lawmakers for largely backing her recently rolled-out public safety plan.
Gov. Spencer Cox, Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, and House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, requested the mayor submit the document before the session in a fiery December letter criticizing the city’s response to homelessness and crime. The request set the stage for a possible showdown between City Hall and Capitol Hill over who polices Utah’s largest city.
While the city avoided a state takeover of its police force, lawmakers did pass HB465, which requires the Salt Lake City Police Department to work with the state’s Department of Public Safety on enforcement measures.
In the end, lawmakers mostly supported Mendenhall’s plan by passing bills addressing jail overcrowding, the state’s dearth of mental health and substance abuse resources, and high housing costs.
But they did not tackle the mayor’s biggest ask: to set up a consistent, dedicated funding source for the Beehive State’s homeless services system.
“In order for us to achieve the changes that are desperately needed for those individuals on the street and demanded by the state, we’ve got to do it all,” she said. “And this is not all of it. The funding is a major gap.”
Mendenhall’s plan also called for state officials to open more emergency shelter beds for homeless Utahns. A clause in HB465 should aid the state in setting up its new 1,000- to 1,600-bed homeless campus within city limits. The mayor said the clause could be used to set up a temporary structure or help secure the final site. She did not share a timeline for when that could happen or say if the shelter is indeed coming to the capital city.
A newly launched state website about the campus says officials will announce the site this summer.
Mendenhall also touched on a handful of other bills set to affect the city and its residents. She highlighted negotiations on SB195 — which would’ve stopped officials from adding any traffic-calming measures to city streets for a year — as successful in narrowing its language and scope to just state review of some projects on bigger roads.
She also criticized SB336 for further limiting what tax revenue the city can collect from the proposed Power District development and ballpark, and HB267 for cutting the right of the city’s employees to collectively bargain.
Mendenhall also said the city’s attorneys are evaluating whether the municipality will sue the state over HB77, the bill banning pride flags in public schools and government buildings, if Cox signs it.
