A two-year saga surrounding a monument on Library Square ended Thursday night when a member of Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson's staff took full responsibility for a misstep that compelled the mayor's office to raise $340,000 in private money.

Adviser D.J. Baxter said that his signature on a contract for the organ-donor monument obligated the city to pay for it when the foundation that had been responsible for it folded. An audit that the council requested and paid for showed that city procedures were not followed. Baxter's mea culpa was a response to a City Council discussion Thursday of the audit.

Baxter said he should have cleared the project with someone in the city engineering department for oversight and checked into the Quest for the Gift of Life Foundation's fund raising.

"The foundation had raised $500,000 to $600,000 already just in the preceding year," Baxter said. "Given their prior success and, frankly, my inexperience, I had no reason to doubt their numbers."

The $1 million monument on the southeast edge of Library Square was dedicated in May 2004 and serves as a memorial for family members of whole-body donors, who do not have remains for burial, Baxter said. The city paid most of the final bills for the monument March 31 and is waiting for a few outstanding checks for the construction companies and architect.

City Council members questioned how the monument slipped through the city's public process and supervision for funding large projects. Deputy Mayor Rocky Fluhart said that because the foundation was at first in charge of raising money, the city wasn't following the project.

"It happened because the financing had not gone through the city and it did not go through our control," Fluhart said. "We didn't know anything about it. I saw it being built, but we thought it was part of the library."

In the end, though, Baxter said that not a penny of tax-payer money was used for the monument, and the city got a meaningful sculpture and fountain on Library Square.

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E-mail: kswinyard@desnews.com