Salt Lake City will enter the annual hate crimes fray at the Utah Legislature this year.

After a week of soul-searching over Mayor Rocky Anderson's proposed legislative agenda, the Salt Lake City Council Tuesday found a handful of items it wants its new city lobbyist to work on at the Legislature — including the controversial hate crimes legislation.

While some council members had argued hate crimes laws are not a purview of city government, Dale Lambert successfully argued otherwise.

Lambert agreed that hate crimes laws are not necessarily a function of city government but said that with ethnic minorities making up 51 percent of Salt Lake City's schoolchildren, hate crimes legislation has become a city concern.

"This one, I think, is a Salt Lake City issue," he said.

Hate crimes legislation has regularly been proposed at the Legislature for the past several years, but it has never passed.

While hate crimes is the hot-button issue, the one item council members overwhelmingly supported was Salt Palace Convention Center expansion funding, which would need a Legislature-approved increase to hotel room taxes.

"Any energy the city spends on lobbying . . . I suggest it be spent on the Salt Palace expansion," City Council Chairwoman Jill Remington Love said.

Of course, when other items arise during the legislative session the city can adjust to take up positions on those issues as well, council members said.

The council said the lobbyist should pursue two other issues: changes in Utah's Governmental Records Access and Management Act and increased taxes for tire recycling, which would facilitate the relocation of the existing tire recycling plant on the city's west side.

Those last two issues didn't make Anderson's list but made other lists developed by city department heads and the Utah League of Cities and Towns.

Still, according to some informal polling by council staffers, a majority of council members didn't support most of Anderson's nine-item legislative agenda and there was no council member interest in three of Anderson's causes. Those three included creating a task force charged with developing a universal health care system in Utah, allowing non-abstinence-only sex education in schools and giving unmarried couples the right to adopt.

While a few council members may politically favor such ideas, they don't think they are municipal issues.

Those items on Anderson's list that received support from a minority of council members were local control for living wage laws, Photo Cop implementation and firearm control. Also, there was "some interest" in pursuing legislation that would force cars to pass bicyclists with at least 3 feet of clearance and ban smoking in all public places and mass gatherings of over 50 people.

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