Remember Horton the Elephant? "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant . . . An elephant's faithful one hundred percent!"

OK, so Salt Lake's mayor indicated that the Unity Center would be well under way by 2004, and that the people of the west side would be consulted as to what they wanted. Well, it's now 2005, and plans don't appear to be completed. And the west side was never given a choice to do something else with the $5 million that was to be spent to improve their lives.

Ironically, now the mayor is calling for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to have "more open public discussion of the church's $500 million downtown redevelopment project" and is concerned that planning has been done in a vacuum. The mayor also criticized his predecessor for making deals behind closed doors; he opposed the closing of a part of Main Street.

However, he now seems to have mirrored those traits he criticizes. In trying to resolve the Main Street Plaza problem, he isolated himself to come up with solutions without public hearings. The first one didn't fly, so he went back to his private drawing board.

Then one night he came up with the solution that would justify selling the Main Street Plaza to the LDS church. After exchanging e-mails with a friend in New Delhi over human trafficking and prostitution in her country, the Main Street issue didn't seem that important, but saving one Salt Lake girl from forced prostitution would be worth the trade. He would swap the city's easement across Main Street for an LDS plot of land and build a community center for the people on the west side.

By some miracle, the Alliance for Unity stepped forward to support the mayor by ponying up $5 million from private contributions to build the community center on the donated plot of land. Good deal, except the mayor never consulted with the west-side folks about the idea or held public meetings. He then proclaimed success in giving up on free speech for a greater cause. Another problem was that he never thought of how staffing and maintenance for the center would be paid once it was built.

Only when the people of the west side demanded to know what was going into the center did the city start holding community meetings asking for suggestions as to the use of the building, while not telling them that the city was already negotiating with agencies to provide programs in the center. Some might have wanted to use the $5 million to shore up existing services such as the Boys & Girls Clubs, police, housing or economic development, but they had no choice.

After cutting the deal with the LDS Church in December 2002 and the Alliance for Unity committing its $5 million to build the center, it was all downhill with one excuse after another for the delay in building the center. Folks were told the plans were being drawn, yet it was not decided what the building was to house. Later it was decided that all city residents would use the facility, so citywide community meetings were then held.