S.L. stalling on center, Alliance for Unity says

The Alliance for Unity isn't happy.

Instead, members are unified in their frustration over Salt Lake City's backsliding regarding the Unity Center — a key component of Mayor Rocky Anderson's Main Street Plaza solution.

"Are we frustrated? Yes," Alexander Morrison, executive director of the alliance, said following the group's monthly meeting Monday.

"We have an agreement with the city. We have given them $4 million to build a Unity Center, and so far they haven't done it."

Two weeks ago, Salt Lake City admitted for the first time that the Unity Center, to be built in Poplar Grove near 900 West and California Avenue, wouldn't be opening in step with the much-publicized time frame city leaders committed to two years ago.

"We've been told all along that it would be open in 2005. Now they're saying in the first half of 2006," Morrison said.

And alliance members are worried even early 2006 may be ambitious since the city hasn't shown them a business plan, contracts for potential tenants nor building designs.

"So far we have not seen any business plan, any memorandum of understanding with clients and no detailed architectural plans," Morrison said. "We have given the money in good faith, and we need to make sure they are continuing in the same spirit."

Morrison said he didn't know what action the alliance might take to hurry the project along.

District 2 City Councilman Van Turner, who represents the Poplar Grove neighborhood, said people can blame him for the delays.

Turner, along with Department of Public Services director Rick Graham, said the city has had trouble closing on a small piece of privately owned land in the middle of the planned Unity Center campus. Turner has insisted that the project not move forward until the land can be secured, giving the campus a full block.

"I apologize up and down for stalling. I take full responsibility for stalling it, but I think in the end we'll have a better project," Turner said.

The City Council allocated $320,000 for the purchase of that land in January and has been reimbursed by a private donor. Still, the city has yet to close on the property, which is owned by two people going through a divorce.

It would be premature to move forward with the Unity Center until the city closes on that land and knows it can incorporate it into the center's campus, Turner and Graham said.

The center is planned just west of the existing Sorenson Multi-Cultural Center. The Unity Center is expected to be a health and fitness mecca with educational and service components. There may also be room on the campus, near 900 West and California Avenue (1300 South), for a new Guadalupe Schools educational facility.