After a long and convoluted road spanning more than seven years, the Living Planet Aquarium is still on a long and convoluted road.

Tuesday's vote by the Salt Lake County Council to consider putting a $30 million bond on the ballot toward the aquarium's construction was both good news and bad news for aquarium backers.

Good news because the council is considering the project at all after many council members had expressed considerable antipathy toward it; bad news because the issue would not come to a vote until the 2006 election, not this November.

That's pretty much been the story of the aquarium's life. Since 1997, Living Planet president Brent Andersen has talked to Lehi developers and city officials, state fair organizers, Salt Lake City and Redevelopment Agency officials, donors and Salt Lake County officials and it's always the same: Just enough interest to keep the proposal alive but not enough to push it over the line into reality.

For example, while Andersen said he was cheered by the County Council's interest in considering a bond vote — where the council could easily have gone against him — the timing puts a deal he has with the Salt Lake RDA in jeopardy.

"Given the decision today, we've got to ask ourselves what we're going to do," he said afterward.

The RDA owns 4.8 acres of land at 500 West between 300 West and 400 West, which it has leased to Living Planet for a nominal amount during the past three years.

The RDA has repeatedly had the chance to scrap the arrangement because aquarium backers have failed — spectacularly, at times — to meet fund-raising targets. But each time, Andersen and others have persuaded the RDA to hang in there.

For example, through March the aquarium was supposed to have raised more than $2.5 million but only reached $1.8 million. Even so, the RDA extended the lease to Nov. 15, on the condition that aquarium backers get a bond on November's ballot (and persuade voters to approve it) or raise $5.6 million privately — a remote possibility, given their track record so far.

The RDA is probably at the end of its patience. For months Mayor Rocky Anderson has agitated to end the lease, and even RDA board members who supported its extension have indicated that they're not inclined to do so again.

While the current land deal is the best one yet — near The Gateway shopping center and Pioneer Park, a happening place right now and paid for by RDA dollars, this wouldn't be the first time the aquarium has survived deals that have fallen through or gone nowhere to begin with.

Consider: A deal for the aquarium's location just north of Thanksgiving Point in Lehi fell apart, a plan to install it as part of a new science center at the State Fairpark didn't happen, a proposal to put it in Pioneer Park itself was killed.

And yet the aquarium idea survives.

If nothing else, give these guys points for tenacity. Andersen is most definitely a glass-half-full kind of guy.

"I don't know how anyone could be disappointed in a potential funding source of $30 million," he said. Yes, seven years is a long time, but he noted that other successful aquariums have had gestations of up to 12 years.

Five years to go. Stay tuned.

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E-mail: aedwards@desnews.com