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SALT LAKE CITY — The city’s new mayor set her sights on growth, public transportation, the inland port and affordable housing — all in the context of climate change and environmental impact — as she delivered her first State of the City address.
“I’m here to tell you that we’re ready to kick things into high gear,” said Mayor Erin Mendenhall, who took office in January. The future of Salt Lake City, she assured, “is green.”
Speaking to a packed auditorium at newly constructed Meadowlark Elementary School Monday night, Mendenhall gave constituents a preview of what her first term as mayor of Salt Lake City will look like.
“We did a lot,” she said of changes Salt Lake City saw in 2019, including improvements to infrastructure and public transportation, the addition of over 1,000 new jobs, and the opening two new homeless resource centers. But the mayor quickly transitioned to her policy goals going forward.
Planting trees, requiring new construction to be solar and electric vehicle-ready, and a new city policy that views every operational decision through the lens of sustainability were among the mayor’s key solutions to combating air pollution and climate change.
“We’re going after our carbon output in a big way,” Mendenhall said.
The port is coming, and it is a reality that future generations of Salt Lake City residents will live with long after you and I are gone.
–Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall
“If you want to build in Salt Lake City and you want our help in doing so, you really must be an active participant in our work to address climate change,” she said, adding that her office is working to transition the city’s electricity to 100% renewable sources as soon as possible, a model she hopes will be a blueprint for other Utah cities.
Mendenhall also introduced the new “tickets for transit” program, which makes a ticket to the twice-per-year general conferences of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a free pass for public transit, a program she hopes will expand to include the University of Utah and other businesses and organizations in the city.
The mayor then shifted to the Utah Inland Port, a controversial proposal to bring a roughly 16,000-acre commercial shipping hub west of Salt Lake City International Airport, which critics say could dramatically worsen the valley’s air quality. Mendenhall acknowledged the port could “negate” the city’s progress toward improving air quality.
“The port is coming, and it is a reality that future generations of Salt Lake City residents will live with long after you and I are gone,” Mendenhall said before listing off the environmental assurances her office needs in place — like requiring the port to be carbon neutral — before any construction starts.
Mendenhall went on to say that not only will her office ensure the port abides by these environmental assurances before development, but continues to after she leaves office.
“I have and I will continue to pursue assurances through a contract that would guarantee inland port development is perpetually (on the) leading edge with social and environmental goals,” she said.
