Salt Lake County Sheriff Aaron Kennard is using a Tuesday decision to halt creation of a Unified Police Department to boost his re-election bid, the sheriff's challenger said Wednesday.

"Aaron Kennard has flip-flopped on the UPD initiative for one reason only, and that is to get himself elected," said Jim Winder, a 20-year veteran of the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office.

The UPD's governing board of local mayors and other elected officials voted Tuesday to wait another year before starting up the countywide police agency.

But Kennard said he's not cashing in on a thing. In fact, he said the board's decision to delay the start-up is what he wanted all along.

In the process of negotiations for the new police agency, local mayors are finally realizing that the old system just needs a little tweaking — not a complete overhaul, Kennard said.

"This UPD process has accomplished exactly what we were hoping," Kennard said. The mayors have "finally realized that what we've got is not all that bad."

Why create the UPD when "you already had UPD with the sheriff here now," Kennard said. By pushing back the possible organization of the police agency a year, the UPD's governing board can figure out a way to make all sides happy without wasting millions on the start-up costs for a new unified police agency, he said.

But Winder said everything is not as peachy as Kennard paints it.

A major part of UPD negotiations is the issue of more local control: Mayors in member cities want to have more input over hiring and firing, as well as control over how each precinct is run. Winder said if cities were happy with the sheriff's current system, they wouldn't be asking for more local control.

But Cottonwood Heights Mayor Kelvyn Cullimore disagreed. "That's totally inaccurate," said Cullimore, who sits on the UPD's governing board with two members of the County Council and mayors from Bluffdale, Herriman, Holladay and Riverton. "The mayors are satisfied with the level of service they are receiving from the sheriff."

Winder said Kennard wasted two years in an attempt to create the UPD when he should have focused on securing better contracts with cities.

The sheriff originally started the idea of the UPD after Draper and Taylorsville stopped contracting with the sheriff for police services and started their own police departments.

By creating the UPD, several cities could pool police resources under the umbrella of the sheriff's office. But Kennard said he can achieve that same balance by spending the next year working on the current precinct model with the sheriff's office that spreads out policing authority across five precincts in the county.

The UPD's governing board has several issues to work out before a decision on the police agency's future can be made, Cullimore said.

"We didn't flip-flop on anything, we're just pursuing a parallel path," Cullimore said. "We did not put the thumbs down on the Unified Police Department, we just said, 'Hey, we need more time to do it right.' "

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