The Unity Center, at about 900 West and California Avenue, is set to open in September 2006 - nine months later than planned.

As promised, the center will include a fitness center with cardio machines, weights and an aerobics studio. It also will open with a drop-in day-care center, six dental chairs, a theater for professional and community productions and three rooms for classes to be determined later.

"We wanted to provide a variety of things," says Rick Graham, director of Salt Lake City Public Services.

Today, he will discuss the Unity Center with the City Council. Graham also could present a long-awaited business plan for the building, which will reveal how much the city may have to pay to operate it.

The Unity Center - which is being built as part of the arrangement that gave the LDS Church control over free speech on the Main Street Plaza - will be associated with the nearby Sorenson Multi-Cultural Center and will be called the Sorenson Unity Center. It is being built with $4.5 million in donations.

The building is being designed by VCBO Architects, which also helped create the new downtown main library. The community center will be designed to prevent crime and to be environmentally friendly, which will make it more expensive to build but should save money on energy bills. Donated Dental Services will lease space in the center to provide free or reduced-cost dental care to the community.

There will be a 200- to 300-seat theater to be rented out by professionals as an alternative to the often-booked Rose Wagner Center.

The city is working with Tooth and Nail Theatre, which could be charged with marketing the Unity theater to other professional groups, producing plays for it and offering theater-education programs to youth. The company puts on nontraditional shows, which have included a burlesque fundraiser and a piece on the experiences of gay youth.

But Councilman Van Turner, whose district includes the Unity Center, envisions more conventional fare.

"We don't want to have a lot of controversy down here," he said.

The center's fitness portion will be 7,000 square feet. But the city has raised expectations that residents - whose top priority for the center is health and fitness features - would see a major recreation center on the scale of the ones Salt Lake County has built in the suburbs.

The city is still working with the county on using Zoo, Arts and Parks tax revenue on a larger gym, but that could be five years out.

Meantime, residents are impatient. There are no private gyms on the city's west side.

"We don't have anything," said Mike Harman, chairman of the Poplar Grove Community Council, who wants the city to use more of the Unity money to build a larger gym. "People are looking for things like that, especially in the wintertime when they can't walk the [Jordan] Parkway."

If the county eventually kicks in money, the city would convert the Unity Center's gym to another use, Graham said.

hmay@sltrib.com