Education priority in Salt Lake City race

What is the most important issue in this year's Salt Lake City mayoral race?

How about city taxes or road maintenance? Parks and open space? What about crime?

No.

Only if you said education would you have picked what three of the four leading candidates claim is their No. 1 issue.

At first glance, it seems an odd issue on which to hang a mayoral campaign, considering that officially the Salt Lake mayor has no detailed responsibilities in educating the city's children.

The city doesn't run the public schools. That responsibility falls to the completely independent Salt Lake City School District, with its own elected board and hired staff.

The city raises no taxes for public schools and has no legally required expenditures for public schools.

The city hires no teachers, sets no curriculum, runs no buses, though it does coordinate crossing guards. The city doesn't even oversee any school athletics; that also is done by a separate group.

And yet, as candidate Dave Buhler puts it in one of his TV ads: "Education is the No. 1 issue facing our communities."

While that may be the case for Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and the state Legislature — whose members often take a lot of political flak over the issue — in reality it has little to do with local cities and counties on a daily basis.

So, why do the mayoral candidates give it such weight?

"Education always comes out as the No. 1 issue among voters," longtime pollster Dan Jones of Dan Jones & Associates said. "People want to know what you (as a candidate for any office) plan to do about it."

A big-city mayor may be able to help school districts through some redevelopment agency land deal every now and then, but by and large, mayors don't deal with education very much, Jones notes.

"A lot of people really don't know who runs the public schools," said Jones, who has surveyed in Utah for 30 years. "So (candidates) play to the No. 1 issue and the ignorance of the voters" over public school funding and policy, he said.

But the superintendent of Salt Lake City School District, McKell Withers, says he'll gladly take what appears to be an extended hand.

"I guess from my view, kids are important to all of us, and investing in young people is critical for a positive future," Withers said. "And so if there are candidates that want to come and help us in that hard work, we welcome that involvement."

The four leading Salt Lake City mayoral candidates — Ralph Becker, Buhler, Keith Christensen and Jenny Wilson — have extensive education-issue planks on their Web sites, even though as the city's chief executive, the mayor would have little real responsibility for public education.

And a few mention education in their advertising spots.