Welcome to Wasatch Fronting, a newsletter(?) written by a former campaign flack with a background in urban planning. Basically, this blog(?) is going to be a compilation to some of my thoughts on elections, campaigns, and the built environment in Salt Lake County.
Truthfully, I don’t have much to say at the moment, but in the interest of not having a “Coming Soon” page whenever people visit, I figured I could just post an introduction to the 2021 elections in SLCo. Might go into a little bit more depth later in the year, but this is just what I’m looking at.
Election Central
Salt Lake City Municipal
Salt Lake City splits up its elections into two off-years: one has all even numbered city council districts and the Mayor’s race, the other has the odd numbered districts. The 2021 cycle falls into the latter category, so we have four city council seats, all of which have incumbents running for re-election. Or at least it looks that way: filing doesn’t open up until June, but all of the incumbents still have open candidate committees. With the exception of the 5th council district, the only non-incumbent personal committees are from unsuccessful candidates from the 2017 cycle, none of whom have reported raising or spending any money since 2017, making it unclear if they’re running or not. I imagine the field will grow when candidates file, given that registering that personal committee is part of the filing process.
The 5th district is the closest thing to an open race that we have in SLC, with incumbent Darin Mano being appointed in 2020 to fill then-Councilmember and now-Mayor Mendenhall’s seat, beating out former 2016 US Senate candidate Misty Snow and the Utah Chair of the LDS Democrats Crystal Young-Otterstrom. The way vacancies are filled is with qualified citizens getting 5 minutes each to make their case to the City Council, who then vote on who they want to join them, which is all to say Mano is untested in elections, and despite having several years of public service, has only garnered 6 other votes in his tenure. As of this issue, Mano has two opposing personal committees, one from a Joseph Laub who seems untraceable, and another from Angel Jimenez, who is a senior at the University of Utah per a reddit post announcing his candidacy. In that same thread, Jimenez talks about wanting to preserve SLC’s “'small-town city' feel,” and says he would have voted to oppose a recent rezoning in that district, which makes Mano my immediate preference. Jimenez announced two months ago, accounting for why his yearly reports show $0 raised, but his donorbox shows he has raised $21 so far. Early days yet, and we’ll revisit SLC when filing begins.
Sandy Municipal
The only other “big” race this year is the Sandy mayoral, which has been the source of some controversy since incumbent Mayor Kurt Bradburn took office in 2018. And when I mean some controversy, I mean a budget veto in summer 2020 over not increasing the pay for first responders, insulting city councilmembers over alleged ties to developers, gave himself a raise then cut his salary when he got caught. He also managed to botch the city’s water quality, kick off the city council from an email list, and subverted hiring practices, just for good measure. So when he announced a few days ago that he was not running for re-election, I think every Utahn who supports good governance let out a huge sigh of relief. Sandy doesn’t require any financial disclosures until 14 days before the primary, and has the same June filing dates as SLC, so there’s no scoop on who’s running to replace Bradburn until someone announces, but I’m expecting a contested race. Sandy was the only city in SLCo that flipped from a narrow Trump win to an even narrower Biden one, so I’m expecting investment from both Democrats and Republicans.
Other Municipal Races
SLC and Sandy aren’t the only cities with races in 2021: just about every other municipality in SLCo will be electing city councilmembers and Mayors, but none have the campaign finance reporting of SLC, nor the headlines of Mayor Bradburn, so we’ll be waiting until June (or candidate announcements) for more on the campaign side.
Now that I’ve ripped my friends over at Primaries for Progress off enough, let’s get into (what I hope to be) the meat and potatoes of this site(?).
Urbanism Corner
Transit
This wouldn’t really be *my* newsletter if I didn’t talk about trains. Recently, Governor Spencer Cox outlined $350 million to go towards double tracking FrontRunner, Utah’s only commuter rail system in his budget proposal. For those of you who don’t obsess over transit as much as I do, FrontRunner is currently (mostly) running on a single track, so trains going both northbound and southbound share one line, as opposed to having a distinct track per direction. Te move to double track is undoubtedly good, as the models show this might nearly quintuple ridership, halve the waiting time for commuters, and save you not 15% or more on car insurance, but 20 minutes off of the commute itself. I’m sure the exact amount being allocated is being debated in committees up on Capitol Hill, but expect investment to happen. For all their (numerous) faults, Utah Republicans at least fund transit. Even Greg Hughes, the former Speaker of the State House who ran a campaign for Governor so far to the right it makes Donald Trump look like a socialist, and is so corrupt he makes Kelly Loeffler look like Elizabeth Warren, has been a big backer of transit expansion.
Housing & Homelessness
Well we aren’t building enough, to roughly nobody’s surprise. Fact of the matter is SLC is a highly desirable place to live, and despite the record number of apartments built, it’s still not enough to keep rents down (although corona will do that for us). The corollary to this housing discussion is that things are getting worse for our unhoused population. So obviously SLC goes ahead with more homeless camp clearings. Thanks Mayor Mendenhall!
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