Plans for Salt Lake City soccer complex moving forward

SALT LAKE CITY — An environmental group's 11th-hour effort to delay a Tuesday hearing on the new, taxpayer-funded soccer complex near the Jordan River was denied Monday by a 3rd District Court judge.

Jeff Salt and the Jordan River Restoration Network filed a request Friday for a temporary restraining order to postpone a Salt Lake City Council hearing on the $44 million Regional Athletic Complex, hoping that further information on the project could be collected from the city. Judge Glenn Iwasaki ruled against that request, and the council will consider issues related to the complex during both its work session and formal public meeting Tuesday.

Salt, who has been engaged in a months-long dispute with the city over public-records requests for documents related to the project, said extra time was needed to obtain items critical to the hearing.

"I think the decision by Judge Iwasaki is really an unfortunate impact of our constitutional rights as the public," Salt said. "We have a right to have records to participate in public hearings with information. Otherwise, what's the point of having public hearings?"

City attorney Ed Rutan said Salt's group already had been provided with more than 9,000 pages of records, and the issue at hand wasn't about making further information available.

"The important thing here to recognize is this is not about access to the documents," Rutan said. "It's about who is going to bear the cost of the search."

Salt Lake City passed an ordinance in 2005 eliminating fee waivers on Government Records Access and Management Act requests for city records. Salt and his group have argued that state GRAMA law allows for fee waivers, if a request is deemed to serve the greater public interest.

Rutan said Monday that Salt essentially "requested every document ever produced by the city that relates to the athletic complex." That request spans years and likely involves some 60 city employees. Efforts to reach out to Salt and his group in an effort to narrow the search were met with a non-response, Rutan said, and the records request issue is now awaiting a hearing in 3rd District Court.

While previous public hearings have been held on the soccer complex, Salt's attorney, Karthik Nadesan, said Tuesday's council hearing would be one of the last chances for Salt Lake City residents to weigh in on the large-scale project adjacent to the Jordan River near 2200 North.