Tuesday, January 25, 2005

The Cities of The State and The State of The City

In Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson's State of the City Speech 2005 he stated:
The choices of those who have decided to commute long distances, mostly as they drive one-person-per-automobile, and to foul our air, [and] clog our roads... should not be encouraged and further accommodated... We want our friends from the north to come to Salt Lake City; we just don’t want them to... undermine the quality of our lives... simply because of the choices they make about where they live and how they get around.
From: Salt Lake City Mayors Office web page. http://www.ci.slc.ut.us/mayor/speeches/stateofcity2005.htm (Emphasis added)
I, among many, were dumbfounded by The Mayors comments and took particualr offense as one who's wife commutes as so described to Salt Lake. I follow her to work on many days to eat, and shop where she works. I am now dissinclined to buy anything in Salt Lake City. Today Desert Morning News writter Brady Snyder reports that the very employee's of Salt Lake City fit the description Mayor Anderson enumerates above:
...hundreds of city employees who labor at and around City Hall drive their cars to the office... City records also show that hundreds of those "friends from the north..." actually work for Salt Lake City.
Specifically, 1 in every 10 (or 307) of the city's 2,962 employees live in Davis County but travel into Salt Lake City to do their jobs. An additional 51 come from Weber and Cache counties.
Besides Davis, another 320 city employees come from other counties, like Utah, Tooele and Summit, to work for Salt Lake City taxpayers. Another 656 live in suburban Salt Lake County cities.
More than 1,600 city employees have Salt Lake City addresses. However, human re- sources director Brenda Hancock said many of those don't live within the city's boundaries but rather in unincorporated parts of Salt Lake County.
It appears that Mayor Andersons thinly veiled distain of "his friends to the North" coupled with his well known distain of the Legacy Highway project has led the Mayor to neglect that sage advice "First look within."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Dugee, I hope you don't mind that I forwarded this link to a few coworkers. There are several of us who work in SLC and live in Davis county, who are similarly outraged by the comments from "that jerk from the south".

Anonymous said...

Some people are good and some are bad. But some are just pure evil. Among all the good in Salt Lake, why was that man given a voice?

Doug - The JeepCruzer said...

An update to this post:
I am proud to say that I have spent hardly any time or money in Salt Lake City since posting this on the blog. I'm not a vigilante, nor do I belive that principal always trumps convenice or necessity, but I'm trying to make a point to the people of Salt Lake City: Elect a Mayor that leaves me alone!