Mayor Rocky Anderson's latest bid to keep a skybridge out of downtown renovation plans failed Tuesday night with an overriding vote of the Salt Lake City Council.

The City Council reaffirmed its April 18 decision to amend the downtown master plan, allowing for skybridges under some circumstances, by voting 6-1 to override a veto by Anderson.

The vote was identical to the original action, with Councilman Soren Simonsen again casting the lone dissenting vote.

Councilman Eric Jergensen said the City Council carefully considered each of the mayor's objections and saw no need to reverse its previous decision.

Anderson issued the veto Monday to challenge action by the City Council that paved the way for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to include a skybridge above Main Street in its City Creek Center development.

The mayor contends the amendment is in "direct opposition to the original intent of the master plan," which calls for the preservation of view corridors. Anderson also has said a skybridge connecting one shopping center to another would create a "gerbil-cage tube" in which people would be trapped, hindering pedestrian activity on Main Street.

Councilwoman Jill Remington Love said those issues were addressed in the numerous council discussions that produced the language of the amendment and criteria for a skybridge.

The amendment to the master plan allows the council to approve plans for a skybridge as long as those plans have a minimal impact on view corridors, make use of urban design elements that integrate the project into the rest of downtown, and do not stifle street-level pedestrian activity.

"We've established a method and a process," Love said. "We have not approved a skywalk."

After the meeting, Anderson criticized the council's decision to override the veto, saying, "There's nobody in the planning community who would support a skybridge in a downtown under these circumstances."

The mayor also vowed not to convey any air rights to make way for the bridge, meaning developers will have to deal with Anderson's successor when he or she takes off in January 2008.

The City Creek Center developers — the LDS Church's real-estate arm, Property Reserve Inc., and retail partner Taubman Centers Inc. — say the second-level pedestrian walkway is vital to the 20-acre project's shopping component.

"This whole rhetoric about how it's going to trap people is ridiculous," Bruce Heckman, Taubman's vice president of development, said in a telephone interview Tuesday night. "What we want is people on the second level to be able to flow smoothly over to the other second level."

Taubman also is proposing escalators at each end of the bridge, as well as an elevator at one end to provide easier access to the ground level, Heckman said. Originally, Taubman had proposed elevators at each end of the skybridge.

"As we talked about it with the City Council, they felt an escalator would be even better," Heckman said.

---

Contributing: Doug Smeath

E-mail: jpage@desnews.com