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The Sugar House Park Authority has rejected a proposal to erect a monument to the memory of Joe Hill, a prominent figure in the labor movement who was executed in Utah 100 years ago.
Sugar House Park is the former site of the Utah State Prison, where the execution took place.
Hill was convicted of killing Salt Lake City grocer John G. Morrison in 1914 following a controversial trial. Morrison's son, Arling, was also killed, but no one was charged in the teenager's death.
Some people, then and now, believe Hill's trial was flawed and the conviction was unjust.
Justin Daniels, a member of the Joe Hill Organizing Committee, met with the seven-member park authority board on Thursday night and described the committee's proposal. The board rejected the plan, with five members voting against it and two members abstaining.
An earlier effort to build a monument in the park was rejected in the 1970s by then-Gov. Scott M. Matheson.
"It's always been a long shot to get them to do this," said Daniels after Thursday's meeting.
The committee plans to meet with the board again in January in hopes of finding a way to make the monument a reality.
In recent weeks, Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker and his challenger in the mayoral race, Jackie Biskupski, a former Democratic state representative, have said they would support the idea of building such a monument.
Hill, a native of Sweden, worked as a laborer around the West and was a songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World.
Becker's campaign tweeted that Hill "was paramount to the labor movement and the SLC community. I would support a monument in his honor."
A statement on Biskupski's campaign website calls Hill's execution "a grave miscarriage of justice" and says the Morrison family was denied the prosecution of the actual killers.
"It is time for our community to acknowledge this injustice," Biskupski's statement says. "I support a proclamation stating these facts and I support the proposed monument remembering Joe Hill and John and Arling Morrison."