Free-speech problems on the horizon?

If the ongoing dispute over Main Street Plaza is any indication, former Mayor Rocky Anderson sees a future of First Amendment battles brewing in downtown Salt Lake City.

In 2003, Anderson helped broker a deal to sell the public easement on the one-block stretch of Main Street to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in an effort to quell "one of the most divisive episodes in our city's history," he said. But as the church continues to reshape the capital's core through the multibillion-dollar City Creek Center project, Anderson and American Civil Liberties Union attorney Stephen Clark worry about another set of free-speech problems on the horizon.

"There are going to continue to be episodes where people's conduct runs afoul of church standards, and the city is going to have to deal with (whether to) prosecute," said Clark, who successfully litigated a case against the city following the plaza's sale in 1999.

During a discussion at the S.J. Quinney College of Law on Thursday, Anderson and Clark offered an inside look at the contentious sale and the lawsuits that followed and hypothesized about the potential for future problems with the LDS Church taking such a major role in downtown's redevelopment.

But Dale Bills, a spokesman for City Creek Center, said that development will operate under different standards than Main Street Plaza.

"Open space at City Creek Center will be controlled by the Taubman Company, a strategic partner in the project that operates retail centers through the country," Bills said Friday in a prepared statement. "Behavior standards for the Main Street Plaza are specific to church ecclesiastical property. By contrast, guidelines for open space areas in City Creek Center will conform to privately owned commercial space standards."

For their part, past and present Salt Lake City Council members defended the decision to sell the Main Street Plaza land to the LDS Church

"I don't have any regret as far as going through the sale itself," current Council Chairman Carlton Christensen said in an interview Thursday.

The city's long-range plans included closing down that section of Main Street and turning it into a park or plaza, Christensen said. But without selling it to the LDS Church, that may have never happened, he said.

The money from the initial sale eventually paid for projects in the Gateway District, Christensen said. "We would not have had that money otherwise."

Former Council Chairman Keith Christensen told the Deseret News that traffic concerns on Main Street and the need to add light rail played into his decision to vote for the sale, while advocating the city's retention of the public easement.