Warm days for governor, S.L. mayor?

With offices only eight blocks apart on a straight line up and down State Street, it seems likely that Utah's governor and Salt Lake City's mayor would meet regularly.

After all, one runs the state and the other runs the state's largest city.

But collaborative meetings have not been the norm for the past five years as former Gov. Mike Leavitt and Gov. Olene Walker held Utah's top spot with Mayor Rocky Anderson holding court in Salt Lake City.

Enter Republican Gov.-elect Jon Huntsman Jr.

Even before being sworn in, Huntsman went to City Hall on Tuesday for a meeting with Anderson — the mayor's first ever sit down with the state's governor-elect.

Observers say Tuesday's meeting may spell a new season of coziness between the governor and mayor, built on Anderson's long-standing friendship with the Huntsman family and the governor's father, billionaire Jon M. Huntsman Sr.

"To me that's an encouraging, statesmanlike move on Huntsman's part," Joshua Ewing, Anderson's former communications manager said of the Tuesday meeting. "It makes a lot of sense. You might as well understand what the issues are even if you don't agree with a lot of them."

While Huntsman likely has a more conservative agenda than Salt Lake City's liberal mayor, he's willing to hear Anderson's concerns.

"We want to have a good relationship with the mayor of the largest city in Utah," Huntsman's chief of staff Jason Chaffetz said.

Anderson has proposed his own nine-issue legislative agenda for the 2005 Utah State Legislative session.

The City Council has declined to support most of Anderson's causes, which includes heightened gun crime penalties, adoption for unmarried couples, stricter bans on smoking and statewide health care, save for hate crimes legislation — a cause that the council may use city funds to lobby for.

Anderson wouldn't say much about what he and Huntsman discussed Tuesday but did say that his legislative agenda and some initiatives were topics of discussion.

"We talked about a number of things, both what I would like to see happen at the Legislature and also some state initiatives I would like to see," Anderson said.

Chief among Anderson's recent beefs with state lawmakers has been the fact that the legislature took away cities' ability to regulate gun laws and to install PhotoCop technology to catch speeders. Anderson wants those abilities given back to cities, citing the conservative principle of local rule.