‘The most powerful person in the building’ will leave Salt Lake City Hall this month

A third-floor corner office in Salt Lake City Hall belongs to one of the most influential staffers in Utah’s capital, yet her tiny desk — barely big enough for a computer monitor — is shoved out of the way, almost like an afterthought.

Instead, a heavy wooden table surrounded by 10 chairs dominates the space.

This is where Cindy Gust-Jenson holds court as the Salt Lake City Council’s executive director, a position she has served in since 1987. It’s where agendas are formed, policies are born and alliances are nurtured.

Come Jan. 31, her tenure will end as she retires after nearly four decades of steering the council of Utah’s largest city.

“What I do isn’t important,” Gust-Jenson said. “It’s what the council members do and what the mayor does, and so we’re just here to facilitate that. I was never, ever interested in being in office. I was interested in extending the reach of people who are in office.”

She will leave City Hall a seasoned pro at shaping council policy and shepherding political agendas. After starting as a 28-year-old who was selected for the job as a compromise between bickering council members, she has built a commanding reputation.

“Anybody who knows Salt Lake City government knows that Cindy was the most powerful person in the building,” Mayor Erin Mendenhall said. “That was well known.”

The genesis of Gust-Jenson

Gust-Jenson’s eclectic resume, one that allowed her to ascend to a position of prominence, started when she was 3.

Her grandmother, first-generation American Helen Gust, operated an Arctic Circle in Magna. As soon as they were able, Gust-Jenson and her brother — both toddlers at the time — were in charge of stamping the fast-food restaurant’s takeout bags.

It was in that building, among the smells of barbecue beef, french fries and her grandmother’s homemade Greek dishes, that Gust-Jenson’s political interest also started cooking. Because in the back room of that Arctic Circle, secluded from the general dining area, county commissioners and other local politicians frequently stopped in for a visit and a meal.

“My family was very politically aware,” Gust-Jenson said.

Her uncle, John Gust, was involved in politics as a developer and built relationships with local leaders over meals at the fast-food joint.

“We all lived right together in a little [Magna] neighborhood,” Gust-Jenson said. “He would say, ‘You’re interested in this stuff? … Can you get your friends and pass out this bushel of flyers?’”

Gust-Jenson treated handing out flyers and addressing envelopes for political campaigns as “the opportunity of a lifetime” when she was a child, and it led to her volunteering for Ted Wilson’s first Salt Lake City mayoral campaign in the mid-1970s. She later joined the city as a research analyst under Wilson’s administration.

Then, Gust-Jenson became Wilson’s press secretary during his unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate. During that campaign, she labored under the legendary Matt Reese, known as the godfather of political consulting, who worked with candidates like Robert F. Kennedy and John Glenn.

Reese introduced her to a new political strategy that was just taking off: using demographics and census data to determine political interests in a given area.

Reese also had a creative way of campaigning — what he labeled “36-hour marathons,” Gust-Jenson recalled.

These marathons involved 36 hours straight of traveling to communities all over Utah on a tiny, nausea-inducing plane packed with staffers. During one of these marathons, Wilson made a special pit stop: to officiate Gust-Jenson’s wedding.

“He’s just such a great guy,” Gust-Jenson said of the late former mayor. “So honest and so ethical and full of vigor. He was always so creative and just really did great things, and so it was exciting to work for him. He was just always so kind to me and supportive.”

Settling into City Hall

After the press secretary job, when Wilson lost his 1982 Senate bid, Gust-Jenson came back to work for the city part time as a policy analyst. That job was short-lived, due to the lingering disappointment from the losing campaign and Gust-Jenson’s need for a full-time position.

So she “worked all kinds of funny jobs.” She repossessed cars, interned for KUER, volunteered for the state Department of Social Services, and kept a job at her grandmother’s Arctic Circle, all while she attended classes at the University of Utah.

But her main gig from 1982 to 1987 was for the Utah Health Care Association, overseeing nursing homes and long-term care facilities. In that role, she verified that patients across the Beehive State’s 89 nursing homes at the time received quality care in line with federal regulations.

She maintained her ties to government by serving on several boards, including one for Planned Parenthood and another that advised county leaders on aging services.

“I would just do all these things,” Gust-Jenson said. “I was just kind of like a work-crew wild woman. I eventually ended up in the hospital, just out of exhaustion.”

After five years of focusing on health care issues, Gust-Jenson decided it was time for something new. She wanted to work with residents on stop signs and sidewalks, she said, instead of dealing with life-or-death decisions due to a lack of health care funding.

So she applied for a job with Salt Lake City — a position that was part-analyst, part-media liaison and part-intergovernmental liaison. She applied through the then-director of the council office, Linda Hamilton, whom she knew from a health board.

Gust-Jenson served under Hamilton for 11 months as the council’s jack-of-all-trades. When Hamilton took a job as the city’s finance director, the council had to pick a new chief adviser.

The city had a pool of three candidates — all hired around the same time as Gust-Jenson. At that time, Gust-Jenson recalled, the council had an “ugly partisan” 4-3 split, and the warring factions were divided about the two other candidates.

“They were fighting a lot about it,” Gust-Jenson said. “What I heard is, in their meeting, they said, ‘Well, so does anybody hate Cindy?’ And they picked me when I was 28 years old.”

A reporter, Gust-Jenson recalled, laughed at her when she told him how old she was, thinking she had to be joking.

But Gust-Jenson had a wealth of political connections at that young age, including her trifecta of mentors: Ted Wilson, who had left office; his chief of staff, Dolly Plumb, who was the grandmother of current state Sen. Jennifer Plumb; and former County Commissioner John Hiskey, who worked with the Utah League of Cities and Towns.

“Just the idea that [Wilson] was there to stand behind me and back me up and keep me in mind, and things like that,” she said, “really made a difference in my success.”

A 37-year career, and what’s left to do

Since she was hired in 1987, Gust-Jenson has seen seven mayors, dozens of City Council members and explosive population growth in Utah’s capital.

As leaders came and went, she stayed in office, becoming almost a living historical record of city governance. That’s been an incredible asset when council members ask her how they can create a new program or fund a new initiative.

“Mayors and administrations get attention for what they’re going to do. … Every four to eight years, it means we kind of change direction,” council Chair Victoria Petro said. “The council department, under Cindy’s leadership … has kind of underpinned and offered us stability while we got to kind of emerge as this progressive center in the middle of a really conservative state.”

And Gust-Jenson’s institutional knowledge has helped. Most recently, council members tapped her expertise when the city was negotiating with Smith Entertainment Group over the downtown sports, entertainment, culture and convention district — one of the city’s biggest partnerships in decades.

The mayor, Petro and city staffers were working through a contract with SEG and hit a roadblock, but Gust-Jenson remembered a similar scenario from the ’90s that Petro said unlocked the next step of negotiations.

It was a stressful time for council members and their support staff, but Gust-Jenson helped everyone take a step back when things got overwhelming, allowing them to move forward in a way her successor, Deputy Council Director Jennifer Bruno, said could be almost therapeutic.

Gust-Jenson’s most important skill, Bruno said, is thinking through every possible solution.

“She’s not ever been one to say, ‘Here is the right way to do it,’” Bruno said. “It’s sort of like, ‘Tell me about how you would do it, and let’s think about what that would mean if we do it that way.’”

City officials have known that replacing Gust-Jenson — someone with a web of connections that spans every level of government; someone who can get an answer to anything — would be nearly impossible. But they’ve been preparing for this moment. About 15 years ago, the council hired a job coach who helped Gust-Jenson document her institutional knowledge for others to follow after she leaves City Hall.

For decades, she has been training her replacements. Bruno has worked with her for 20 years, she said, and two other deputy directors have had years of experience with Gust-Jenson.

But after all her accomplishments — like shepherding through downtown’s City Creek Center mall development, organizing visiting dignitaries’ experiences in Salt Lake City for the 2002 Olympics, and all the other historic moments she has carefully guided the city through — she knows life is too short.

Gust-Jenson turned 65 in September, meaning she has spent over half her life with the city. It’s time to spend the rest of it with her family — especially her grandchildren and her goldendoodle, Buddy, whom she takes on the occasional trip to McDonald’s for a hamburger.

Even in life after politics, she still plans to get her hands dirty. This time, though, it will be in her garden with her husband, Cory, and granddaughter Riley.

“I just thought, ‘OK, I’ve done this for a long time. I’ve loved it,’” she said. “‘I still love it, but I just probably need to realize life doesn’t go on forever.’”

It’s time to let someone else sit at her desk.