- [Announcer] Welcome to the 2023 Salt Lake Mayoral Debate, presented by PBS Utah, KUER, and the Salt Lake Tribune.

(gentle music) - From the University of Utah campus, welcome to this evening's debate with candidates running to be Salt Lake City Mayor.

I'm Lauren Gustus, executive editor of the Salt Lake Tribune.

It's my pleasure to moderate tonight's exchange, which is brought to you by PBS Utah, KUER, and the Tribune.

The candidates who were invited to speak tonight are Erin Mendenhall, current mayor of Salt Lake City, Michael Valentine, a local activist, and Rocky Anderson, former mayor of Salt Lake City.

During this debate, the candidates will be answering my questions as well as those from other journalists.

We also received dozens of questions from would-be voters, and I will include as many as possible, noting when I do.

More than one would-be voter also requested that candidates not focus on what others have not done, but instead focus on specifically what you will do to address the issues that they care about.

The format for this debate is as follows, each candidate will have an opportunity to respond to the question.

We will allow 90 seconds for responses in the first portion of the debate and 60 in the second.

I will signal the change.

And you also have a timer in front of you here.

Finally, we will do a lightning round of yes-no responses at the end of the evening, just before closing remarks.

Candidates may have 30 seconds of rebuttal time at my discretion.

I may also pose a follow up question, and I may ask a question of a specific candidate and will be directive when doing so.

Finally, I will try to fact check your responses in real time, interrupting to ask for clarification, or to ask you to cite the source of information.

We have an in-studio audience, and I will ask them to hold their applause until the end of the debate.

Let's get started.

Rocky, this first question is for you.

The Tribune has reported that downtown Salt Lake fared better than most US cities, as it pertains to visitorship, after COVID peaked, and yet you have said, "The Mayor and a sycophantic council have led us to the worst humanitarian crisis among our homeless population in our city's history."

Can you tell us what you think the city is doing well today, even as we are experiencing, in your words, a humanitarian crisis?

- I think that we have some amazing businesses and business owners that are contributing tremendously to this city, but they are struggling every single day with our homelessness crisis and the affordability crisis that means that most of their employees can no longer afford to live in Salt Lake City.

But we have an amazing community.

I've always felt that way.

I love our city.

I just am upset.

I'm so concerned about the degradation of our city that we've seen in these last four years, due to a lack of leadership, and we can do so much better, and that's why I'm running for mayor.

- Thank you.

Michael, same question.

What's working?

- I think the community is working, the people here.

After COVID, a lot of people, we had an influx come in from California and other states, so I think we're getting a lot of amazing people coming into the community.

I would agree with what Rocky's saying, where the homelessness has gotten worse every single year.

Last year we had 160 people die.

Businesses got pushed out of downtown.

I'm a business owner myself.

I own a cider shop down at the Gateway.

I'm also very famous for my work, trying to save the historic Pantages Theater.

I'm a director of a 501c3 nonprofit now.

A lot of people don't understand the whole reality of that deal.

There was also four businesses that were removed from downtown.

One of 'em was Twisted Roots, a Black-owned business that was there for over 10 years that was kicked to the curb for a $0 deal for Texas billionaires.

So it's very unfortunate when we have local businesses that are cultural, and minority owned, and very important to the community, being kicked to the curb.

So I'd like to see almost an opposite change where we are focusing on local business, local folks living here.

We're building deeply affordable housing for locals, not for people coming in for California tech workers, or Goldman Sachs, or things like this.

So I think we need a very abrupt change from what's going on.

- You said 160 people died.

Could you be more specific in reference to?

- Yeah, I would reference the Salt Lake Tribune article about that.

It was an article a few years ago, or last year, about that number.

So it's directly from the Salt Lake Tribune.

- Erin, you've regularly pointed to the successes our city is experiencing, and I'd like to flip this question for you, if I may, and ask you where can we be better.

- You're right, I would be more than happy to talk about all of the progress that's been made in the city, and there's been a whole lot of it.

But places that we can do better are almost everywhere.

There's room for improvement every day, and that's why we keep coming out with new alternative solutions to conservation of water for the Great Salt Lake, new ways to create affordable housing, like the Perpetual Housing Fund, new ways to do public safety better, like the civilians that we've now brought into the police department.

We're never going to stop.

But one of the ways I think that helps us uncover what those opportunities are, are right through the community.

We have made permanent our racial equity in policing commission who brings us reforms, addressing the policing culture, budget, and their policies.

We take those to the city council, we get those funded, and we implement them because they improve the way we do things.

We've made our boards and commissions now a stipend, so more people who couldn't necessarily afford to participate as a volunteer influencing city business can now have that compensation to show up, for childcare, for their transit pass to get there.

The way that we're growing is acknowledging that there's always room for improvement.

And Salt Lake City, in my administration, is never gonna stop with that vulnerability of acknowledging that our people are here to teach us.

We are public servants and we take that very seriously.

We can never be done being willing to listen to how we can do better.

- Thank you.

Michael, this next question is for you.

I'm interested in understanding how you would look to maintain relationships as a leader of Utah's capital, especially in a city that's often at odds with a powerful state legislature.

Salt Lake City's leaders have both taken their shots and looked to build relationships.

What would your approach be?

- Yeah, this is a great question.

We had this question the other day at the last debate, and I love this question.

I think I'm a very different candidate than these two up here.

I'm the only one that hasn't been the mayor before.

I'm also, if I would be elected, the third youngest mayor in city history at 35 years old, which I think is very important to mention, as a Millennial.

I'm specifically running as an independent.

This is a non-partisan race, so we don't really need to declare, but I think it's important to declare 'cause I'm not one that believes in political parties.

I'm trying to unite people from all backgrounds and boundaries, and I think we've been very successful with that.

I have on the left, like anarchists and communists supporting me, and then on the other side, people on the right supporting me as well.

I think to highlight this point is a month or two ago, I wrote an op-ed about homelessness, my personal story of being homeless, and then how I was requesting that we ban abatements, homeless abatements right now, we set up sanctioned camping right now for everybody.

But after that op-ed came out, I was invited on the Rod Arquette Show, which I think is very interesting, it's a very right wing show.

They asked great questions and great points about, hey, how can we set up sanctioned camping so homeless people aren't being preyed upon.

And I think to be able to go on a show like that, and to reach across boundaries and unite people, and talk about issues and solutions, and not be part of traditional party politic-like tribalism, I think is very important.

So I think I could build boundary, or build relationships a lot better than what we've seen.

- Thank you.

Erin, same question.

I'm interested specifically in how you would cooperate with state lawmakers if reelected.

- That's been a big part of my job, and as you know, when I was the chair of the city council in 2018, and our mayor walked away from state negotiations on the inland port and left us hanging out to dry, I reached out to the governor, as head of the legislative arm of the city, and reinitiated those negotiations.

And today we are no longer in the legislative washing machine every year, and finding new ways that the legislature can extract more from the city as it relates to the inland port.

But we've locked up our tax increment, and we know exactly where it's going, with the inland port, for decades to come.

And they are now investors in the environment and in the west-side community with the majority of that tax increment, 80% of it total, will be going to the environment or the west-side community.

That's an example of the kind of bridge rebuilding because we've had too many mayors, including one on this stage tonight, who made it a point of burning more bridges than they were building.

Even when I came into city council in 2014, I had legislators tell me, "We're still punishing you for Rocky," as a reason for doing whatever they were doing to hurt the city.

Those bridges have needed rebuilding.

We have seen it.

We see it in their investments in deeply affordable housing over the last two sessions.

We see it in their investment in homeless services, and their leadership on the strategy, as we saw with the winter shelter plan where we have other cities helping us host, and the state funding it like we've never seen before.

That kind of persistent, patient relationship building is what Salt Lake City's always deserved and I finally brought it.

- Thank you.

Rocky?

- Yes, thank you.

This whole notion that I somehow don't work with legislators is so absolutely absurd.

I have a long, proud record of working with people of all kinds and making a real positive difference.

John Huntsman Sr and I co-convened the Alliance for Unity, bringing together a diverse group of leaders from throughout the community to address issues that were dividing our community.

That's exactly what it should all be about, working together.

And they respect me because they know I will fight for principle, like we did with the Sierra Club.

We have a mayor that just wants to have a place at the table all the time.

Yes, on the Legacy Highway it was wrong, it was gonna be more polluting, it was gonna damage the wetlands.

That was a fight worth fighting, and we won.

And we, as a result, have the Legacy Parkway, a much more environmentally advanced highway coming into our city than the Legacy Highway, because we had the real leadership.

People are looking for leadership that will stand up on principle, and it's true.

I mean the mayor has said that I-15, she thinks is a done deal, so she just wants place to the table.

I will continue to fight against the expansion of I-15.

You cannot expand highways and see yourself out of this continued sprawl development and more traffic.

- Thank you.

We will return to I-15 in just a few minutes.

But before we do, we've got a question from Mia Merchant, welcome.

- Hi, as a young person who grew up in Salt Lake and who wants to stay in Salt Lake and work here as a public servant, a school teacher more specifically, I'm worried about the cost of living.

I fear that as a public school teacher I won't be able to live anywhere near where I grew up or where I teach, possibly not even in Salt Lake at all.

Even if I do find an apartment, I worry that I'll never be able to get a house.

What do you plan on doing to make Salt Lake more accessible to young people who want to live here, specifically, young people going into public service related careers?

- [Lauren] And I'd like, excuse me, to ask Rocky to take that question.

- Thank you very much.

Affordability in housing is at a crisis level in this city, and it's because the current administration, all these years, continues along the old worn out paradigm, getting sucked into the market, and saying we're gonna subsidize these for-profit developers, keep shoving their pockets full of millions of city dollars, public money, so they can keep building this horrible, mostly unaffordable, mostly architecturally awful apartment buildings throughout our city that aren't gonna be affordable to you, and your friends, and much of your family, probably.

I will make certain that we make the shift, like the voters up in Seattle just demanded in a successful voter's initiative, like we see in Vienna, for instance, with non-market housing where the city sees providing affordability in housing as a public good, just like our libraries, just like our streets, just like our airport, that we will build, and we'll make sure that it's architecturally beautiful, just like our library is, something that we can really be proud of, and we control it.

The reason it's called non-market is because you won't be facing the insecurity of an increasing market for housing, because the city will control it, and it will be mixed income, affordable housing.

And I'd urge everybody to take a look at what they're doing in Vienna, where 60% of the people are living in this kind of housing.

- Thank you, Rocky.

Michael?

- Yeah, so I have an interesting answer to that.

I'm actually part of the generation that is being priced out.

I'm the only one up here that's a renter.

I don't own a house.

Right now, I actually live in an RDA project that had opened in the summer down by the Gateway.

My rent is $2,000 a month.

That was a project that was subsidized by this current administration.

I also have a real estate license.

I've been in real estate for over half my life.

What's going on right now is literally the opposite of what needs to happen.

You might have a catching theme of that tonight.

What we're doing is we are taking public money, through the redevelopment agency, we are subsidizing luxury housing, calling it affordable housing when it actually isn't.

What this is doing is artificially raising prices, increasing unaffordability, driving people into homelessness and driving people out of the city through gentrification.

So what we need to do is actually use public money for the community, not for real estate investors and developers.

The Pantages, still a lot of people think that was about fighting to save a historic theater, which it was, investing in the arts.

But the real story about that is how the city gave away $20 million of public property in a $0 backroom deal to a Texas company that manages $160 million of real estate globally.

They don't need any free money from the city.

They can go build what they want.

That's $20 million that was sucked out of public pockets that should have gone to housing, to education, to homelessness.

And we need to have public money being used for the community.

- Erin, before you answer Mia's question, I wanna offer you the opportunity to respond to the statement that the city gave away $20 million.

- The city had land that we owned, which we put on the block, and the responses that we received to the public benefit we wanted from that land, which included affordable housing creation, were responded to publicly, went through a public process, actually under Mayor Biskupski, although he insists that I did this deal, it was the mayor before me who inked this deal, and that the assurance of public space in the creation of a downtown park space and affordable housing were a part of that contract.

That's the benefit that we would get from the investment of our land in that project deal.

- Let's return to.

- Have a quick rebuttal?

- [Lauren] Yes, you have 50 seconds.

- So you were on the city council at the time, you voted for the $0 deal.

You actually took donations from Joel LaSalle before doing voting on that deal.

The apartments that the city subsidized there are 60-80% AMI, I've seen the the plans, most of them are studio apartments, the rest of the building is one to two bedrooms.

So the fact that like, even the appraisal, like the RDA didn't even appraise the theater.

There's a Tiffany skylight, marble floors in there.

You guys appraised the land.

It was way underneath.

It's an acre of downtown real estate in the middle of Salt Lake.

So the fact that we got a good trade off there is just ridiculous.

- Okay, that's time.

Erin, can we move to Mia's question, what you will do for affordability for young people.

- Yes.

Mia, I feel you.

Salt Lake City's been growing for a long time.

Salt Lake City population's grown about 20,000 people in the last 20 years or so.

And recently we've become a majority renter city.

We used to be majority home ownership.

These are factors that no city can control when it comes to growth itself, but we can do something with it and get the most out of it, in two big ways, especially around land use, which city councils and cities can control, and then around other affordable housing, or rather affordability things like your transportation, where a recent study, I believe it was by Envision Utah, I'll just hit that now, showed that the average Utah household spends about 20% of their household income on transportation costs.

These are things that the city can actually affect.

My administration has invested more than every mayoral administration combined in affordable housing.

We've gone a 413% increase in affordable housing unit creation invested in by the city.

And the reason we're investing in housing that's already being created here is because we're growing.

We've actually shown that to invest by ourselves, as Mr. Anderson is proposing, would cost us 18 times more to build new units.

And on retrofits it would cost about eight times more.

So out of that 55 million we've invested, we've built 4,000 new units of affordable housing, which is defined by the federal government, not by politicians up here on stage.

4,000 new units in the last three and a half years.

And we've just put another 20 million on the line to make thousands of units more.

- Thank you, that's time.

While we're on the subject of units, and units that have been built, Erin, I'd like to ask you this question.

How many people who were homeless are right now living in housing that didn't have housing when you became mayor?

Let me reframe it.

So we know that there are units under construction.

We know that there are units that have been pledged.

What I'm interested in is do we know how many people who were formerly unhoused have moved into housing.

- It's important to understand that the way that this data is tracked is not by any single city, but it's through our continuum of care.

And for Salt Lake City, that's the continuum of care of Salt Lake County as a whole.

You can go to the Homeless Management Information System, HMIS, as we call it, and that's where this data is tracked.

It's tracked on a rolling basis.

And so we know that from 2020 to 2022, we don't have '23 data yet, obviously, that 70% to 72% of people who touched this homeless resource center system in the county resolved their experience of homelessness, the majority into permanent housing or temporary housing.

And then others who choose, because of their own rights to not disclose, about 4% go into institutional, meaning detox, foster care, substance use treatment programs.

So in total, I think the number is just over 14,000 people since 2020 have experienced homelessness and resolved their experience of homelessness.

- If I could, just a quick follow.

How many units have, can we know how many units we now have that we didn't have previously?

I understand that there are 14,000.

- I can tell you how many units that the city has helped to fund that are permanent, supportive housing.

Is that your question?

- Sure.

- In Salt Lake City proper, where we have contributed dollars, that number was 777, until the Ramada owner pulled out of his deal.

And now that number would be 577 permanent supportive units that we have funded that are either open or are in the pipeline to open.

- Thank you.

- You're welcome.

- Michael, I'm interested in your view.

What constitutes success when we're talking about homelessness?

How will we know that we have solved the problem?

- Yeah, so I have a very different stance on this.

I released a housing homeless plan in February of this year, and as far as I know, I'm the only one up here on the stage who's personally been homeless.

It's a very personal issue to me.

In my plan, very simply, my plan is to declare a state of emergency, setup sanctioned camping for everybody.

And then that's a way to unify resources, intake everybody, and then put them into housing right away.

This has been shown successful all over the world.

Houston was able to house 25,000 people in the last 10 years this way.

Funny enough, when I released my plan later on this summer, the mayor of Denver, Mike Johnson, was just elected, and literally the first thing he did was what I outlined.

He declared a state of emergency and vowed to house 1,000 people by the end of the year.

And last week, they had a moving day they called it where they closed an encampment and actually moved people into housing.

My situation, the way I would define it, is what the rest of the world is doing, I'm trying to catch up.

Finland is on the verge of curing homelessness, ending homelessness.

To me, success is nobody on the streets anymore.

We house everybody, and then we stop people from ending up in homelessness.

I think we could make Salt Lake City one of the first major cities in America to just completely eradicate homelessness and house everybody.

And the rest of the world is already doing that.

- Thank you.

Rocky?

- Yes.

Thank you for asking that question.

It's important that our mayor be straight with the people of the city, especially about matters of life and death, and the quality of life for everybody, because it not only impacts those who, during the winters, have been losing their lives, who have suffered amputations of fingers, lower limbs, toes, because of frostbite, with the mayor not providing any shelter for them, turning her back on those people when there was no alternative place to go.

And she wants to say, "Well, it's not my responsibility."

She's the mayor of Salt Lake City and this is where it's all happening.

But she promised, she told us in September '22 that by April, the city was gonna be putting up $6 million to three different projects.

And by April there would be this movement of people who were in the winter overflow shelter into these three projects, providing about 400 units.

Now we have, in the last point in time, count 435 unsheltered people in Salt Lake County.

When she told us about these projects, and just about a week ago we were in a debate and she said 300 of these units, meaning the old Ramada Inn and the medically-vulnerable population project, were still under construction, that was an absolute falsehood.

We held a press conference yesterday.

Am I?

My time's up?

I'm sorry.

Thank you.

- You are at time.

I'm interested in what success means for you.

- Well, success for me means that we end all encampments.

By doing this 50-pod political pretense, that's not going to meet the needs of all of the hundreds of people that are currently in encampments.

And this mayor has refused for four years to provide for a sanctioned camp, a place where we can get people out of their present encampments, and they can be in a place where they'll be protected against these vicious raids by the mayor's police, and the confiscation of their property, including their survival gear during the winter.

And that we can then get them with case managers and outreach workers that can help them transition into jobs, into treatment, and into housing.

That's exactly what we need.

Right now, they're being moved all around.

Nobody's keeping track of them.

There are no outreach workers that are assigned to any one of them.

There are no individualized plans to get them out of homelessness.

And now we are out these 200 units that we were promised, and the mayor said they were still under construction about a week ago during a debate, it was absolutely false.

And that's where we held that press conference yesterday.

It hadn't been, it hasn't been in the Tribune, I don't know why.

But we showed how the mayor has misled the people of the city and missed these amazing opportunities.

And now we're headed into another winter without those 200 units.

So success is getting people into housing, getting treatment, if people are disobeying the law, making this place safe for families, businesses, and everybody else who lives here, as we do what we need to do for the homeless community.

- Thank you.

We're at time.

Erin, I'd like to give you 30 seconds to respond to the fact, to the allegation that you are turning your back on our homeless population.

- I also wanna respond to the allegation that I'm not being straight with the people.

That is not what these people deserve.

We deserve to have the facts and he's twisting things again for you here.

I toured the units that were under construction at the Ramada this summer.

I saw the demolition that was happening, and I saw a unit fully completed.

That is happening.

Last night, the Sandy City Council approved the medically-vulnerable shelter in Sandy City, which is an adaptive reuse of an existing hotel.

That's something that will be more about moving in supplies than doing a complete construction.

It is in process, and now it's happening.

By April, when I said that the $6 million would be creating those units, we actually had three permanent supportive housing and transitional housing people, companies, operators, say, "Yes, we will do that."

Salt Lake City has had developers switch out and not do what they said they would do many times in the past, which is why we always get that money back, this happens.

Having leadership that anticipates bad players is part of running a city in a good job.

And that's what we're doing here in Salt Lake City, is putting those dollars where we're gonna get the most units out of them.

- Thank you.

Excuse me.

In case you can't tell, I have a frog in my throat.

We have now reached the halfway point of our Salt Lake City Mayoral Debate, featuring Rocky Anderson, Erin Mendenhall, and Michael Valentine.

I'm Lauren Gustus, executive editor of the Salt Lake Tribune, and your moderator this evening.

Let's get back to questions.

Respondents, you will now have 60 seconds per question.

And we'll kick it off with a question from KUER reporter Sean Higgins.

- Candidates, thank you for being here.

This question is for all three of you.

In today's political climate, campaigns can all too often descend into name calling, personal attacks, and vitriolic rhetoric.

After the votes have been counted, those on the losing side and their supporters might feel cheated that their voice was not heard.

If you are victorious, what will you do to build bridges with those who did not vote for you?

- Rocky.

- Thank you very much.

I won twice, elections for mayor, and everybody knows that I didn't ever consider where somebody was on the race before.

I kept people employed that worked for my opponent.

We were open and accessible for everybody.

My job, and the job of those who worked for me when I was mayor, who worked for the city, we all knew we were working for the people, and that means all of the people.

I am so done with partisanship.

None of this should be about parties.

It should be about increasing the quality of life for everyone in our community, and doing it with compassion for residents, for businesses, for employees, and for all members of our homeless community.

And that's the way I will govern.

It's the way I always governed for eight years as mayor.

- Erin?

- Yeah, thanks.

I love the words building bridges that you said there, Sean, and I think that's the greatest contrast between me and my opponents here tonight.

It's really difficult to talk about being open and accessible, as Mr. Anderson just said, when you're picking fights with literally everyone from your own staff, looking at the rate of turnover from Mr. Anderson's administration, you can compare that to my administration if you'd like to, to the state legislature, to local leaders.

The ability to be open and accessible is really hard when you're a combative person and you're burning bridges all over the place.

I was in city hall for a long time before I was the mayor.

I know those relationships.

I've stood before city or community councils probably a thousand times in the 10 years I've been in office.

And I've had a lot of conversations with some people, even in this room, who have my phone number, where we disagree most of the time.

But disagreeing, and then doing it productively, and staying in the relationship, so we can disagree or agree about the next subject is the way local politics works best.

And we've done that, coming out into the communities with my city council, or my city office liaisons, meeting in the communities, not forcing people to come into city hall.

Always being open and trying to be accessible, even with language more than we ever have as a city before.

Thank you.

Michael?

- Yeah, so again, I mentioned I'm an independent.

I'm not part of political parties.

I'm running to unite everyone.

My campaign slogan is uniting everybody and building the Salt Lake City of our dreams.

I released a homeless plan on housing and I also released an entire platform.

I'm the only one up here that's released an entire platform.

I'm really looking at the root causes of these systemic issues, and thinking about what Salt Lake City looks like in 2030, in 2040, in 2050.

I'm the voice of a new generation and represent younger people.

Rocky and I are friends.

People online see us like hit heads a lot, but he's invited me to his house.

I know, no matter what happens, we'll work together long into the future.

I actually tried to meet with Erin for two years.

I tried to give her the whole Pantages deal on a silver platter.

I had people all around the world, national experts, I was talking to the Eccles, I made offers to buy the theater.

I tried for a long time to work with her, and I'd be happy to work with her down the road.

I have no enemies up here.

I'm just running to see Salt Lake City reach its potential.

- Thank you.

Let's transition to the Great Salt Lake.

Our historic winter does not solve for our challenges.

As mayor, what specifically will you do to ensure that more water is reaching the lake?

And Michael, why don't you take that first?

- Sure.

Yeah, it's a great question.

Obviously the Great Salt Lake affects all of Utah.

It's not just a Salt Lake City issue.

Being the mayor of Salt Lake City is more responsibility, as it is the capital city.

I think it's the responsibility of the mayor to lead by example, and to build bridges, work with other cities, and then take those voices to the legislature, to the state of Utah to be heard.

I would push for the state of Utah to do better.

I support the Sierra Utah recent lawsuit against the state of Utah for its inaction on the Salt Lake.

I would like to see the EPA actually step in and take the reins.

I think this is a federal issue, and I think it's a ecological disaster, a nightmare, when you have scientists saying we have to save the lake in the next couple years, or arsenic dust clouds, large portions of the Wasatch front will be unlivable.

I think we need to drastically change the agriculture use of the lake.

I think it's like 67% of the water coming out of that is very concerning.

So I'd be a voice for the city, for the rest of Utah to push for the state and the federal government to see some real change.

- Thank you.

Erin?

- We're doing quite a lot, and we're going to keep finding new ways to do more.

We put a drought awareness in place for the city over the last couple of years.

And in 2022, Salt Lakers responded voluntarily, and conserved 2.9 billion gallons of water, just because we asked them to.

We are doing a top-to-bottom audit of every system that the city controls, from parks and golf courses, to libraries and city hall, police stations, et cetera.

Any improvements that we can make around water conservation are going to be in this audit.

We're already finding some savings where we can do things that save us millions of gallons already that we're working with the council to have funding to implement.

And we're taking advantage of a new piece of legislation, since I've been the mayor, that allows water treatment facilities to permanently dedicate all of their treated water for an environmental use that wasn't available before.

For us, that's 13 billion gallons of water.

And it's important because of things like these news outlets are covering right now around more requests for extraction, whether that's for lithium mining or other forms of mining, semiconductor development, et cetera.

We need to protect that water so it isn't forced to be diverted from us.

Working with the state and rural agriculture is something that our public utility and mine administration is doing, and being invited to the table is a big part of influencing those discussions.

- Thank you.

Rocky?

- Well, it would be great if we had an administration that would walk the walk and turn the sprinklers off at Washington Square during major rainstorms.

That's not setting a very good example.

That's not helping create the personal ethic and the societal ethic we all need in terms of water conservation.

There needs to be absolute transparency in terms of what our city facilities are using in terms of water, including our golf courses.

We need to do everything we can to get away from any turf requirements.

When I came in as mayor, we had a ridiculous ordinance on the books, requiring turf in people's front yards and parking strips.

I violated it.

It was civil disobedience.

It made the news on the front page of the nation section of the New York Times.

They said not only was my yard distinctive, it was all drought tolerant xeriscaping, they said it's also illegal, and it was.

And it helped push the council toward a reasonable ordinance.

Sometimes that's what good, solid leadership requires.

And this is a matter of the survival of our city.

With the kind of consequences we're gonna be facing, and it's gonna be in four or five years, we need to stand up against any alfalfa agriculture that's using up 68% of the water that should be going into the Great Salt Lake, adds about 0.2% to our economy, and one third of that alfalfa is going to China.

- Thank you.

We are at time.

We should have left more time for that question.

Clearly not solvable in one minute.

I'd like to move to a couple of questions from readers.

So these are reader submitted.

This first question comes from a woman named Joanne Rolls.

And Rocky, it will go to you first.

The question is, "How would you make our roads safer?

I really appreciate the speed mitigation efforts on 800 East and 1000 East.

What else can be done to make 700 East safer, biking safer for children and adults?

We need a safe way for bikers to get to Research Park across Foothill and Guardsman, and to get to main campus on the U and the Health Sciences Campus."

- Yes, and those details are obviously because that's where she lives and works.

This is happening throughout our city.

I jumped on a bike a while back and tried to drive into Sugarhouse.

It was treacherous because of the condition of our streets.

And the man who used to head up our streets and parks when I was mayor, I ran into him one night and he said, "Man, I can't imagine what you would've done to me had I let our streets and our parks get in the condition they're in."

I issued an executive order.

It was called the Complete Streets Executive Order.

It was later turned into an ordinance.

And that executive order, I still stand by.

And that is, we need to make every street safe, and accessible, and welcoming to every form of transportation.

And one thing I think we need to explore, because like South Temple, narrowing it down to one lane, and the traffic jams, and the emissions while people are waiting to get down there, we need to explore, on parking strips, we have sidewalks, let's have, at a different elevation, bicycle lanes that are completely isolated from the traffic, far safer than just painting a line down the road.

- [Lauren] Thank you.

Michael?

- Yeah, so this question is great.

It goes into the I-15 issue, which I imagine we'll get to in a second.

It's why it's so important that we have to move away from cars, and invest in public transportation, and actually master planning cities to a detailed level for walkable cities, walkable communities, investing in protected bike lanes.

And one of the issues that this kind of goes into as well is this construction boom going on right now through all over downtown.

I live downtown, I work downtown.

There's holes, blocks, whole sidewalks and streets that are just like completely taken over by construction companies.

There's almost no enforcement of this, where people are in very dangerous situations of trying to move around construction.

Down by the Gateway, there's literally a block where there's like three or four apartment complexes being built right now, and it's very unsafe for people to get around.

And then the other issue I'd like to highlight too, this goes into disability community and our ADA folks, I would like to see in my administration an ADA master plan for the whole city.

So we're not just building walkable cities for people that aren't ADA, but we're building it for everybody, so wheelchairs, and everyone can get access to Trax, and sidewalks, and everywhere.

- [Lauren] Thank you.

Erin?

- I got a lot to cover in 60 seconds.

The quality of our roads has been deteriorating, basically since the 2008 recession when the mayor at the time decided to, rightfully I think, direct funds toward keeping our staffing and keeping as many services afloat, rather than doing the roadway maintenance that had to be cut at the time.

The result of that, over many years, meant that most of our roads were in poor to failing condition, over 60% of them when I became the mayor.

When I was on the city council, we had the opportunity to increase the sales tax, thanks to the state giving us the prison.

And you told us, as a community, we want you to invest in our roads, and public transit, and affordable housing.

And we did those things.

So we've been now repairing and rebuilding more roads than we have in decades.

And finally, we've turned the corner from every year having a decline in the quality of our roads to improving our roads, filling tens of thousands of potholes, even before summer hit this year.

But this is also about Vision Zero.

This is about 25,000 bus passes into our kids' hands.

I have three kids, two of my kids walk home from school, and it is scary for us.

We have to make it safer, but it's not just for cars.

- Thank you.

Another reader question.

Many people have asked what you would do to improve our quality of life.

They're concerned with personal safety, cleanliness of parks, garbage not being picked up in public spaces, too many potholes.

This reader, Renya Nelson, asks, "Our city used to be clean and have utilities accessible to the community.

This past spring, the bathrooms were locked at Liberty Park.

What is your promise to the constituents of this city, as it pertains to beautifying public spaces?

What will you implement that doesn't exist yet?"

Michael.

- Yeah, this is a great question.

So my platform has like lots of issues on there, and I've kind of cut them down into two separate camps, surviving and thriving.

My position is to like start with our most vulnerable community and work our way up.

I'm a business owner, but I've also been homeless, so I have a kind of a unique situation looking into this issue.

Every business in Salt Lake should be very excited about sanctioned camping 'cause it instantly cleans up our cities.

It unites resources.

It makes compassionate areas for our homeless community to go to that then get intaked into public housing.

So that would clean up our cities right away, just getting people off the streets and into housing.

I think, at the very basic level, the government needs to keep services going.

We have a lot of floods, a lot of rainwater going on.

This current administration has an adopt a storm drain plan right now, and I think that's preposterous that we don't have the money in Utah's capital city to keep those storm drains being cleaned out on a regular basis.

- Thank you.

Erin?

- Yeah, this is a great question.

Beautifying public spaces and quality of life is something I think that became very personal to all of us, during the pandemic especially.

We saw our parks and trails use increase more than 40%, and it didn't come back down after we came out of our homes.

We all, I think, then took that energy and invested it in our ballots last year, where we said together as a city, we wanna make the biggest parks and trails investment we've ever done.

We're building our very first regional park in over 60 years on the west side, at the old Raging Waters site, Glendale Regional Park.

But we're doing park improvements in every city council district.

We're doing trail connections that punch through the west and east divide in the city.

Air quality is another quality of life issue.

It's what got me into local politics.

We are going to 100% net renewable energy by 2030, every single outlet in this entire city.

We're going together, even though Rocky Mountain Power said we're not gonna be able to do it till 2050, we brought them back to 2030.

Transit expansion is another major quality of life.

We've added more buses, we've improved hundreds of bus stops, and now we've put 25,000 bus passes in the hands of every public school kid, their parent, and their teachers.

- Thank you.

Rocky?

- We will be a safe and clean community like we were before when we can move the encampments out of our city once and for all.

Our mayor just responded recently to news reporter saying, "Well, no mayor," he was talking about encampments out by Backman Elementary, and she said, "No mayor in this country can assure that these encampments aren't going to come back."

She's a can't-do mayor.

She will not commit to getting it done.

And we know that New York City doesn't have encampments.

Provo doesn't have encampments.

West Valley City.

Why is it that in Salt Lake City, we have a mayor that acts as if they are inevitable and she shuts down the bathrooms?

One of the reasons I'm running for mayor is I have my law practice on Third South and Main, and I'm writing to the mayor and a city council member, and I've got two concerns.

I'm just a concerned citizen.

We've got all these homeless people on the street, many of whom I was helping, no caseworkers coming to help them, and there are feces and urine everywhere, and it was a disaster, and I was blown off by this mayor and the council member.

- Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, this is the last question before we move into lightning round.

And I'd like to start with Erin.

The question is, we're seeing massive growth south of Salt Lake City.

What will you do to ensure the Jazz stay here, now that the Bees are on their way out, and with RSL in Sandy?

- That's a great question, and the growth around the state is definitely defining the next chapter of this state.

But where we are at, as a capital city, is already being defined.

We're seeing a major push for Major League baseball, and as it relates to Smith Entertainment Group, who owns the Utah Jazz majority, talking about National Hockey League potential coming here.

We are actively engaged with Smith Entertainment Group on talking about how we can make that happen in our already built-out downtown.

Because what people want when they go to a sporting event, from hockey to baseball to NBA, is a full experience.

When you look at what's happening around the country with the growth of other major league teams, it no longer is it that people show up, park their car, walk into their seat, and then leave the game in reverse course.

They want an experience.

People wanna be able to have a good time, be out there with their kids, go out for a restaurant before and maybe go to a bar after, ride your bike home, and then be able to get up in the morning, and take that path back into the downtown.

It invigorates, not only the downtown, but the entire state.

And we want this.

We're working hard on this, and I think it's very possible for us.

- Thank you.

Rocky?

- Well, it seems like our current mayor is just blind to what's really happening, that people experience when they go to these events, and it absolutely is devastating to me, and that's why I am running for mayor, seeing these failures of leadership.

I try to go down to a restaurant on Main Street, just around Third South.

I walk down, I'm climbing, we're walking over unconscious bodies.

And it's disgusting, it's filthy.

People are afraid.

There are people I know that say, "We don't even come downtown to Salt Lake City anymore."

It has become so degraded.

And my heart goes out for people who are in need, but you can't just look the other way, as this mayor and her police department are doing, and allowing such impunity, no enforcement, no deterrence, with drugs everywhere.

We can keep, and I think we would've kept the Bees here in Salt Lake City if it hadn't been so devastatingly awful an experience when Gail Miller comes down and sees what she did in the ballpark area.

- I'd like a response.

- We have very little time.

15 seconds, please.

- Thank you.

What is audacious here is that the mayor who lost Real Salt Lake for Salt Lake City could stand up here and say he would've been able to secure, not only the AAA team, but that he would have a partner in those who are going after Major League Baseball right now.

No one standing up here is saying that we don't need more shelter and that we don't need more housing.

We're all in agreement about that.

But how it gets done is what this race is about.

Can we get the partnerships to actually solve the problems and not do it by ourselves?

- We need to give Michael an opportunity.

Thank you.

- So growth is important, but what's more important is that we don't push out locals that are here.

I am a working class person.

I am of a younger generation.

We have to grow, but keep our city's culture and core at the same time.

I find it pretty wild to sit up here and have this mayor talk about entertainment when that historic theater was destroyed that I was trying to rebuild into an international theater district with the Eccles and the Capitol Theater.

I also think the whole baseball deal needs to be investigated, as Gail Miller gave donations to Erin's campaign while it was being negotiated.

- We are at time.

Thank you.

Let's move into, yes-no questions.

And I'd like to start with Rocky, and we'll go that direction for every question.

So it's a simple yes or no.

I-15 expansion, should Salt Lake City sue to stop I-15 expansion on the west side?

- If there is a good faith legal basis, Absolutely.

- I think suing is the last.

- Yes or no?

- Oh, yes.

- No.

- Okay.

- [Lauren] Housing policy, building up is often offered as a solution.

Would you allow neighborhoods to build up three stories everywhere?

So could we build up everywhere, or should that be limited to certain neighborhoods?

- Start with me again?

No.

- Yep.

- No, it should be limited.

- No.

- [Lauren] Okay, thank you.

Trains are a separator between the east and west sides of our community.

Would you be in favor of working to bury major lines?

- Yes.

- Absolutely.

- We are.

- Final question.

Is this city headed in the right direction or the wrong direction.

- Right now?

Yeah, sorry.

That's not a yes or no question.

- [Lauren] It's not.

Sorry, that's my fault.

(laughing) - But no, we have been headed in the wrong direction for a long time, but it can be turned around.

We can get back to where it is the best city to live in North America, as it was when I was mayor, and it will be highly livable once again.

- [Lauren] Michael.

- No, I think it's almost the exact opposite direction.

Right now, we have a city government that doesn't work for the community.

- This is a yes or no, or one answer.

- Doesn't work for the public.

It works for real estate developers.

So no, it's not in the right direction.

- [Lauren] Right direction or wrong direction.

- The right direction, and almost every data metric shows you that we are.

- [Lauren] Okay, let's move to closing statements.

Each candidate will have 90 seconds for closing statements.

A random drawing was held earlier, and Erin Mendenhall will go first, Michael Valentine will go second, and Rocky Anderson will go third.

Erin?

- Thank you, Lauren.

Thank you, Tribune, KUER, and PBS for hosting us tonight.

Thank you for all of our Salt Lake City voters who are listening to us tonight.

I think we've heard a lot, despite your really good moderation, we've heard a lot of complaining, a lot of non-answers to very direct questions that were asked, and a very myopic focus on a very real and significant challenge that has been the number one focus of my administration since day one.

The numbers of housing investment, units created, people who are now sheltered who were not sheltered before, the crime that is down 15% citywide, 30% in our west-side communities, these are real numbers.

Despite what my opponents might tell you, this data is felt experientially in our community.

We are seeing opportunities, from a future Olympic games that we hope to find out shortly about in the next few months, to Major League Baseball, to the strongest downtown recovery in the nation.

139% more people coming into downtown than we had in 2019.

Salt Lake City is growing.

We are not perfect.

We are not perfect, but we are pretty great.

And we've been through a lot together.

We've been through more than any other mayoral administration and we're doing great.

We're gonna keep working on these hard problems together, and with partners, not isolated on an island alone, throwing bombs at those allies who should be with us solving these issues.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Michael.

- Yes, very great to be here tonight I am a huge lover of PBS.

I actually wore my Sesame Street shirt to represent.

I'm running for a different reason than these folks are.

I was actually asked to run, it's not something I had in the cards.

We talked about a lot of issues tonight, housing, homelessness, the Great Salt Lake.

I really think the number one issue though is accountability in government, it's public corruption.

It's having a government, a mayor, and a city council that actually works for the people, not for real estate corporations or developers.

Having a mayor that takes $100,000 dollars from real estate developers, I think, is outrageous.

So we gotta ask ourselves, who do our leaders work for?

I mentioned this in another debate.

I think there's a huge difference between being an elected official and being a leader.

I find it very crazy that we're said to be complaining up here when people's lives are on the line.

We're talking about 160 people dying, people getting their toes amputated, their feet amputated, having nowhere to go, our city's affordability crisis going through the roof because our city is subsidizing luxury housing and not building stuff for locals.

So it, I really gotta take it back to the basics.

Who do you trust?

Who do you know that is up there to serve you, that is there for you and not for themselves, that's not there for a career, for advancements, for money?

I'm already a business owner.

I'm already doing these other things outside of office.

I would ask that we break away from the politics of old and start something new here in Salt Lake and lead the country.

- Thank you.

Rocky.

- As we've been walking door to door throughout this city for over seven months now with volunteers, I have talked to people in neighborhoods, one was out in the ballpark area.

The wife came out, the mother of two young children, the distraught look in her face when she told me about worrying every single day about the safety of her children, just walking to and from school, and how this administration has absolutely turned their back on our entire community, and it came down, for her, to her children's safety because of the sense of impunity that's coming from this mayor and the police that she tells, "Oh, just tell 'em to move along, don't make the arrest."

She keep saying, "You can't arrest your way out of this."

We have to hold people accountable.

If they're selling and doing meth along the children's path to their school, which is what this mother reported to me, we have an absolute obligation, not just to send them to jail or prison, but to help them get help, make sure that they know that they're accountable.

And people who are having drug problems, the best thing that can happen for them is to be arrested, have to face a judge, and at that point decide which way they're going to go, the ordinary criminal justice route, or go in and get help.

That's the kind of restorative justice program we'll bring to Salt Lake City to help make everybody feel much safer and help turn these lives around.

- Thank you.

- Thank you very much.

- Thank you, Rocky, thank you, Michael, thank you, Erin, for participating tonight and for sharing your plans for public office.

We appreciate those who shared questions in advance or used social media tonight to add to the discussion.

We also greatly appreciate the partners who aired tonight's debate.

And we are indebted to the University of Utah, KUER, and PBS Utah, our host tonight at the Eccles Broadcast Center.

Election day is Tuesday, November 21st.

Registration and voting deadlines are approaching.

Contact the Salt Lake County Clerk if you have questions about making your vote count this election year.

I'm Lauren Gustus, editor at the Tribune.

Thank you and goodnight.

(upbeat music)