SLC Council Candidates and their Views on Historic Preservation

SLC Council Ballots have gone out, so I thought I would gather some publicly available data for your consideration. No spooky stories today.

Chart of Salt Lake City Council candidates (2021)
and their views on historic preservation. 

A couple of years back a volunteer door-to-door campaign supporter for the SLC mayoral election asked me about the local issues important to me and I answered I was concerned with historic preservation. Her response was “I’ve never heard anything about that.”

I would hope that in the last 2 years that at least some of the candidates would take notice of the increased demolition of historic spaces.

This simple analysis clearly does not take into account the multitude of issues facing SLC. Candidates and voters value certain issues over others and decisions are made with those trade-offs in mind.

However, I do believe that historic preservation is intertwined with many of the most pressing issues facing SLC government such as housing affordability, distribution of density, homelessness, open/green space, sustainable growth, and environmental sustainability.

This chart is compiled from publicly available sources and shows which candidates acknowledge historic preservation as an issue. To receive a “Yes” the candidate needed to specifically mention historic spaces or preservation, not simply a vague characterization of preserving neighborhood character as that is too open to interpretation.

You can judge for yourself the effectiveness/sincerity/value of their approaches and their record on the issue.

SLC Council District Maps