Red cowboy hats, horses and causes: How Sandy’s first female mayor landed the city’s top job

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Years before she ever dreamed of running for mayor, Monica Zoltanski was distributing flyers about preserving Dimple Dell Regional Park at such a clip that she started to worry about how much she was spending on ink cartridges.

Before the Sandy resident would go out for one of her horse rides, she would stuff her saddle bag with the homemade brochures raising concerns about a trail-paving plan in the community’s scenic nature preserve. Unmistakable in her signature red cowboy hat, she would ride through the park to chat with people — and pass out flyers by the bagful.

To save money, she started shrinking the font so she could squeeze more and more copies of her call to action on each page. Eventually, she said, it got ridiculous.

“People were like, ‘Monica, we cannot even read this. It’s so tiny,’” she laughs. “‘I need to put them under a microscope.’”

Things came to a head, she recalls, in a neighborhood meeting. The park preservation effort had gotten too big for one person, and she told her neighbors someone needed to take charge.

They responded that the leader had to be her. Someone she didn’t know grabbed a wallet, yanked out a $100 bill and told her it was for the printing costs.

“What else do we need now?” the person asked her.

Zoltanski’s community activism mushroomed from there, with the park movement turning into a nonprofit and deepening her involvement in local government. And roughly five years later, on a chilly Monday earlier this month, she took her oath of office as Sandy’s first female mayor after beating seven other candidates for the post.

But her friend Lisa Caddy said Zoltanski still will lead as the person who persuaded a community to rally around park preservation all those years ago.

“She will find the most unwilling volunteer, and they will volunteer,” Caddy said. “If you’re in the wrong place at her right time, she will convince you to do something.”

A preservation mindset

Since childhood, Zoltanski’s favorite type of horse has been a buckskin, the kind she noticed the heroes in TV Westerns always seemed to ride.

It wasn’t until she moved to Sandy, though, that she fully discovered her passion for riding and became a horse owner — first of a buckskin named Mr. Biscuit, though she has since added others to her stable.

When asked exactly how many horses she now owns, she at first demurs.

“Is that considered a polite question?” she jokes.

The answer is three, she confesses, explaining that horses are like potato chips — you can’t stop at one.

Her love for riding and horses has helped her build connections across Sandy, which she says has become like family to her. Zoltanski’s neighbor and friend Phil Blair said she’ll stop and talk to most anyone she encounters when she’s on the back of a horse.

“And, yeah, when you’re riding with her that can get a little …” Blair trails off with a laugh.

These community ties helped propel her to office in a city that had never before elected a female mayor and where many residents have a very different personal history and lifestyle from Zoltanski. She’s a Catholic in a predominantly Latter-day Saint city and, in a state known for its large families, is unmarried with no kids.

She grew up in the flatlands of Ohio as the ninth of 10 children and moved to Utah as a law school graduate, after a ski trip to the Beehive State left her awestruck by its mountains and natural beauty.

She since has worked as a Sandy prosecutor, in juvenile courts and representing small businesses. As a creative outlet, she also opened antique shops in Sandy and Salt Lake City.

Zoltanski said she loved learning about how craftspeople in the past built pieces of furniture with humble hand tools, painstakingly creating objects that have lasted through time.

Her interest in history and its artifacts also shapes how she views Sandy and what it means to build a community, she said. She loves the city’s bungalow-lined streets, ranch-style homes from the 1970s and ‘80s and split-entry dwellings.

“And now, we see our large-lot neighborhoods, the older homes being torn down and rebuilt with high density and new homes that are built out to the maximum levels the property can bear,” she said. “And while beautiful — I can appreciate the new way, too — it does change the nature of our neighborhoods, how we relate to our neighbors, who can afford to live in those neighborhoods.”

Her efforts to save the city’s parks and landscapes, she says, are another natural extension of her preservation mindset.

‘Tell them what you want’

Zoltanski’s work to stop the trail-paving plan in Sandy’s 630-acre park led her to found the Dimple Dell Preservation Community, and she served as the nonprofit’s president until recently. The group helped gather more than 6,000 signatures opposing the paving plan, and, in May 2017, Salt Lake County and Sandy announced they were backing off the idea and would explore other ways of improving the park.

But that was just the beginning for Zoltanski.

Caddy, who worked with Zoltanski to derail the paving project, said her friend taught her how to advocate for her interests. She says she didn’t grow up in a civically active family, like Zoltanski had, and wasn’t used to voicing her opinion to local leaders.

“I just follow the rules. And you know, you fill out maybe surveys and stuff like that. And Monica always says, ‘That’s not enough. You need to go tell them what you want,’” she said. “She has the guts to do it, and she taught me how to do that, and I’ve never looked back.”

After the Dimple Dell victory, Zoltanski said, Sandy residents started contacting her about other things — families in need, code enforcement issues or wanting a stop sign on a certain street.

And when a city fluoridation pump malfunctioned in 2019 and sent tainted water into some Sandy homes, Zoltanski, who lived in one of the affected areas, sprang into action. Amid a dearth of information, she went door to door and brought clean water to her neighbors and their livestock.

“There really wasn’t any system in place,” she said, “for making sure that there was drinking water for people.”

Eventually, she said, she began to wonder if there was a need for local leadership that was a little closer to residents, and, in 2019, she ran a successful campaign for a spot on the City Council.

Just a couple of years later, she joined the race for Sandy’s highest office, dressing up her campaign signs with the red cowboy hat that helped her stick out during her early advocacy days.

She believes the city is at an inflection point, with housing shortages and critical transportation needs that raise questions about how to grow and improve “without overwhelming our neighborhoods and what makes us uniquely Sandy.”

For one thing, she firmly opposes the idea of building a gondola into Little Cottonwood Canyon, arguing instead for transit hubs in the city and a more holistic approach to the community’s transportation needs.

The crowded mayoral contest pitted Zoltanski against three fellow council members, a former longtime council member and a top council staffer. She beat these competitors and two others in the city’s first ranked choice election. (In the end, she bested businessman Jim Bennett, an outsider to Sandy government, by 21 votes.) She says she doesn’t think the race soured her relationship with current and former colleagues or that they’ll have any problems working together going forward.

“Healthy competition makes for great debate. It makes for a better campaign. Take all comers, bring your ideas and put them out there in the public square,” she said. “We compete with our ideas every week on the City Council. So why would running for mayor be any different?”

Caddy, a Republican, can attest to the fact that the mayor is tolerant and respectful of varying political opinions — noting that she refused to campaign for Zoltanski in her Democratic state Senate campaign in 2018 because of their party differences.

“That’s a test of a friendship, isn’t it?” Caddy said.

The two have remained close anyway, and Caddy said she was thrilled to back Zoltanski last year in Sandy’s nonpartisan mayoral race. The friends also still enjoy debating their political differences.

There’s just one rule, says Caddy: No talking politics while they’re riding horses.