Salt Lake City has at least 24 businesses that make payday loans. The Salt Lake City Council on Tuesday advanced a proposal by Councilwoman Nancy Saxton to put limits on those lenders.

Saxton has put forth several ideas on how that could be done, including setting a per-capita ceiling on the number of such businesses that can locate in the city, or forbidding them from opening within close proximity of each other so a single neighborhood would not attract a cluster of payday lenders.

The council unanimously voted to send the idea to the city attorney's office and the Planning Commission to work out the actual language and did not include any guidance on what types of limits it would prefer.

Councilman Soren Simonsen wondered whether Saxton's proposal will be a "meaningful way to assist people" with debt problems.

"Should we be looking at some educational programming in the city to help people avoid getting into this kind of debt?" Simonsen asked.

He suggested there may be ways the city can address the social problems that create the demand for such lenders in the first place.

Saxton agreed her proposal won't solve people's debt problems, but she framed it as a planning and zoning effort to guide development in a beneficial way for the city.

"This, quite honestly, is not going to save the world. It's not going to stop predatory lending," she said. "I do know that when business is regulated ... it tends not to get consolidated in one neighborhood, which can impact how that neighborhood functions and how healthy that neighborhood is."

Payday lenders are becoming more and more prevalent in Utah. In states that allow payday lending, the businesses average about one per 10,000 residents. In Utah, that number is 1.6 per 10,000 and growing, the Deseret Morning News reported in 2005.

Salt Lake City and Sandy are not the first cities in the state to take on the businesses. At least eight others have set some kind of limitations, including Cottonwood Heights, Draper, Midvale, South Jordan, South Salt Lake, Taylorsville, West Jordan and West Valley City. Salt Lake County is also considering regulating the businesses.

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