ACLU seeks to query S.L. VIPs

The American Civil Liberties Union — by way of its second Main Street Plaza lawsuit — is looking to interview some of the most powerful people in Salt Lake City.

From Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson to high-ranking members of billionaire Jon Huntsman's Alliance for Unity to H. David Burton, presiding bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the ACLU is seeking some major depositions.

Tuesday the ACLU filed a legal brief in the Main Street Plaza case asking U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball to allow the interviews, which the ACLU would use to further its case.

Kimball has slated Dec. 5 for a hearing where he is expected to rule on what, if any, interviews the ACLU can conduct.

City and church attorneys argue that city officials cannot be interviewed as to their "hidden" motivations for passing laws — in this case the ordinance that traded the city's public access easement on Main Street Plaza to the church in exchange for two acres of land in Glendale, where a $4.5 million community center will be built.

The ACLU maintains that the all-LDS City Council bowed to the LDS Church when it traded the city's public access away. Moreover, the ACLU suit maintains Anderson also succumbed to LDS pressure when he proposed trading the easement. The actions are equal to a unconstitutional "establishment" of one religion, according to the ACLU.

Council members and Anderson argue they gained a community center through the deal — more than enough secular purpose for trading away a public access easement estimated to be worth about $500,000.

In Tuesday's filing the ACLU questioned how much of that community center deal was really Anderson's idea. Instead, the brief maintains, the deal developed after "back-room, middle of the night discussions with influential members of the LDS Church who are credited with brokering the transaction that eventually emerged from those meetings."

The city and church, who are dual defendants in the case, will file a response to the ACLU's motion in time for Kimball to consider the arguments Dec. 5.

The initial Main Street Plaza suit came after the city sold a block of Main Street to the LDS Church in 1999 for $8.1 million. In that sale, the city reserved a public access easement across the plaza but gave the church the authority to prohibit on the plaza protests and proselytizing, certain dress and other things the LDS Church finds offensive.

The ACLU of Utah sued Salt Lake City over the restrictions, and last year the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver sided with the ACLU. The court said the city cannot have public access on the plaza while forbidding certain types of speech there.

The mayor later developed the community center deal, which made the plaza entirely private and relinquished public guarantees of free expression and pedestrian passage on it.

Earlier this year, the ACLU, with a half-dozen plaintiffs, filed suit challenging the community center deal on the basis that it takes away constitutional guarantees of free expression and was too favorable a deal for the LDS Church.

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E-mail: bsnyder@desnews.com