S.L. Council defends hiring of consultants

In the five years since Mayor Rocky Anderson was elected, the Salt Lake City Council has paid more than $77,000 to hire consultants for a variety of controversial issues that have hit Utah's capital.

That money was often spent getting second opinions on issues that Anderson was pushing at City Hall. But a Deseret Morning News review of consultant spending — information obtained through a Government Records Access and Management Act request — showed the legislative body has often disregarded the opinions of their consultants or ended up conceding to Anderson's position anyway.

Council members defend the expenditures as legitimate, saying they needed more input before arriving at a final conclusion and required fresh looks at complex issues.

"It's the necessary cost of having dual branches of government," Councilman Carlton Christensen said.

City staffers ultimately have to answer to the mayor, so if Anderson has a strong opinion on an issue it may be difficult for city staffers to give the council unbiased information, thus the need for independent consultants, Christensen said.

In many cases the outside information has helped council members shape their decisions even if they didn't follow the advice of those consultants, council members say.

"It's OK to look outside for advice," Councilwoman Jill Remington Love said. "We've faced a lot of complicated issues in our downtown over the past few years."

And in other cases the council has taken the advice of outside consultants, as it did in amending the city's walkable communities ordinance and the establishment of its open-space fund.

Still, there are some cases in which the council has seemed to ignore its consultants despite paying hefty sums for the advice.

Take five years ago when Salt Lake City was divided about whether it would approve the construction of a sprawling grand mall on its far western borders.

After Anderson vehemently opposed the project, the City Council paid a consultant $6,200 to study the issue. The consultant came back with a finding that the council could approve the mall without causing a detrimental effect on downtown retail.

A few weeks later, however, enough council members went against the consultant's advice to kill the mall deal.

Two years later, during the contentious Main Street Plaza fray, the council spent $23,100 on legal fees researching, among other things, whether it could usurp plaza decisionmaking from Anderson.

In the end, though, the council backed Anderson's solution to the plaza mess.