From Deseret News archives:
Renteria is promoting west side
John Renteria's bid to be Salt Lake City's next mayor may be, in his words, "a long shot," but he still sees a likely victory — even if he loses.
That's because Renteria, 55, a lifelong Salt Lake City resident whose community activism runs deep, has more on his agenda than getting elected: He wants to get people talking about the city's west side.
"For me it's a win-win situation," he says. "We get those concerns that I have and that I represent on the table in open discussions and also on the lips of other candidates in ways that they wouldn't if they didn't have a candidate like myself."
Renteria is an attorney, restaurant franchising manager and current president of Centro Civico Mexicano. Among the mayoral contenders, though, he faces long odds. In the last round of financial reporting, he had no campaign cash to speak of, and in a survey earlier this month, pollster Dan Jones found only 1 percent of likely Salt Lake voters supported him.
On top of all that, he spent the first two weeks of June in jail.
But Renteria has a fighting spirit and a long list of goals he hopes to accomplish, whether elected or not. That doesn't mean, however, that he has conceded the race.
"I'm running because, more than any other candidate, I feel that I'm much more representing what I think the city needs these days with regards to a community-connected candidate, of having been in the trenches, working with the people, working with community-based organizations," he says.
Steve Erickson, a longtime friend and community activist, agrees that Renteria's community involvement is his forte.
"He cares about people and cares about the issues. He cares about the city," Erickson says.
That grass-roots approach may mean Renteria is less politically connected, but he says it gives him more perspective on how to tackle the city's problems, especially on the west side, which he says represents the future of Salt Lake City.
"The city is growing up, it's growing south, and it's growing west," Renteria says.
He calls for a master plan focused on residential growth on the west side and a thriving new business community that makes use of the west's cultural diversity to offer unique shopping and dining that would be a citywide draw.
"We just have a city populace that is so unfamiliar, turned off by the west side because of all the myth and the stereotype that is out there," he says.
