Unity Center deadline is pushed back

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson's administration has pushed back a deadline to publicly release a "plan and conceptual design" for the Unity Center in Glendale.

Four months ago, Anderson's administration promised it would lay out a Unity Center plan and design for the public by last month.

"We are on target to bring this preliminary plan back to the entire community for a review of the recommendations in May," Public Services director Rick Graham wrote in a February op-ed piece to the Deseret Morning News designed to counter criticism that the Unity Center was lagging behind schedule.

Anderson's administration says it will be until at least July before any plans are ready for public inspection.

Anderson, also responding to critics who said the center was lagging behind, said in January "we are still on schedule in terms of the construction and opening of the Unity Center."

Even now, Graham maintains the project will meet its winter 2005 opening deadline. Still, he said difficulties in gaining commitments from potential Unity Center partners are causing delays.

"It's a long complicated process and it's taking a little longer to work through than we projected it would a year ago," Graham said.

Part of the problem has been the process it takes to work with the Unity Center's four community partners — the Salt Lake YMCA, Guadalupe School, Salt Lake Community College and the Salt Lake Children's Theatre.

As the city works out deals about which group will provide what services at the Unity Center, those deals have to be viewed and approved by the various boards overseeing those community groups.

So the negotiation process is taking some time, Graham said.

Anderson's spokeswoman Deeda Seed said some community partners "haven't yet been able to answer questions about their financial capacity to be a part of the project."

For some community partners, Seed said expanding into the Unity Center may prove too monumental.

"For other groups, it may just be too overwhelming a period right now," she said. "They're not organizationally in a position where they can pull it off right now."

At the YMCA of Greater Salt Lake, which has offered to run the center's fitness programs, executive director Ashley Dooley Wohlgemuth agrees the road to the Unity Center is a slow process.