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Posted: 12:39 PM- Salt Lake City Councilwoman Nancy Saxton formally announced Wednesday she is running for mayor.
"Salt Lake City should be second to none. We are the capital city," she said. "Salt Lake City deserves a mayor that is second to none."
She made the announcement at Utah Artists Hands, a locally owned downtown shop because the store "goes to really what Salt Lake is all about," Saxton said. Sitting next to three other mom-and-pop shops, the small shopping district "is what gives our neighborhoods their character."
The location also helped highlight one of Saxton's main platforms: expanding the city's arts and cultural offerings by creating an arts district. She said the block between 100 South and 200 South and Main Street and West Temple - where Capitol Theatre and the mothballed Utah Theatre sit - is the prime spot.
An independent study has called for the city and Salt Lake County to build a new Broadway-sized theater and renovate Utah Theatre, as well as add smaller "black-box" venues such as the ones found in nearby Rose Wagner. Saxton said she supports building the larger theater and the smaller spaces. The city's cultural groups, she said, should help decide whether the Utah Theatre should be renovated.
Despite the LDS Church's plans to redevelop the downtown Crossroads Plaza and ZCMI Center malls into an estimated $1 billion mixed-use project with shops, condos and offices, Saxton said, "We're not going to be the downtown shopping center of the Wasatch Front anymore. Arts and culture is part of DNA in Utah."
Her other platform is strengthening neighborhoods. To do that, she wants to spur economic development by allowing small-business owners - who employ between two and 50 workers - to buy into the city's health-insurance system. The city couldn't subsidize the health care, but she said it could pool the employers, who then could pay less - up to half less, she said - for insurance.
The mayor's post is officially nonpartisan, though party matters in the heavily Democratic city. Saxton is a Democrat.
Other candidates are City Councilman Dave Buhler, House Minority Leader Ralph Becker, former City Councilman Keith Christensen, schoolteacher Robert Comstock, former Utah Democratic Party Chairwoman Meghan Holbrook, colon surgeon J. Preston Hughes, Arnold Matthew Jones, Centro Civico Mexicano Director John Renteria and Salt Lake County Councilwoman Jenny Wilson.
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