Anderson and the City Council were back in 3rd District Court on Friday for another near-five-hour bout of testimonies and closing arguments. The council disputes whether Anderson had the authority to terminate the city's former administrative services director and appoint her former campaign manager, Dave Hogue, to the post.
Anderson and Porter are leaning on a section of state code that would allow her to unilaterally appoint "assistants and deputies."
But Adams contends the position of administrative services director does not fall under either of those categories. At one point on Wednesday, he even pointed to Hogue's business card and said the words were nowhere to be seen.
But Porter downplayed the role of official names.
"Statute is written in terms of functions, not titles," Porter said Friday as she encouraged Judge Kate Toomey to look beyond position titles and into job descriptions and organizational charts, which place the administrative services director under the mayor.
Bluffdale City Attorney Todd Weiler, who said he was operating as an independent attorney representing neither side in the case, took it a step farther. He said by passing an ordinance that would direct Anderson to abandon Hogue as her director of administrative services, the council overstepped its bounds.
"The mayor is not a puppet," he said. "What if they said the mayor had to wear a pink dress with purple polka-dots to City Council meetings?"
On the other hand, Adams and the City Council say the problem is Anderson's misunderstanding of the difference between an "appointment" and a "nomination."
"If advice and consent is never received, the person unfortunately never takes or assumes the office," he said.
"What's happened here is we have a result in search of a theory," Adams said, adding that he believes the mayor began calling Hogue a "deputy" or "assistant" when she found the state code, which her counsel says trumps all other city laws.
Toomey said she hopes to decide on the case by Monday morning.
sgehrke@sltrib.com
