Salt Lake City Council launches into 2026 with historic moment

Chalk up yet another day for political history in Salt Lake City.

With the official swearing-in Monday of four members — including three incumbents and one newcomer, Erika Carlsen — the seven-person City Council now has its first female majority, along with four members belonging to racial and ethnic minorities and four who identify as LGBTQ.

“This moment reflects years of leadership and organizing by women across the city,” Carlsen said in a statement. “I’m proud to join a council that uplifts the voices of the people we serve and I’m ready to get to work to deliver results for our neighborhoods.”

The oath-taking ceremony at the city’s Main Library was filled with emotion and references to family, service and, at times, a sense of challenges ahead for Utah’s capital.

The event summed up the city’s dramatic shift toward diversity in a state where elected officials remain overwhelmingly white, male and conservative. The council’s current makeup comes just six years after the city elected its very first minority member, Ana Valdemoros.

Council Chair Chris Wharton, who was sworn in with Carlsen and fellow returning council members Victoria Petro and Sarah Young, said in a statement that this is “the most representative Council I’ve ever served on.”

“We don’t just look like Salt Lake City,” he said, “we reflect it, and we identify with it.”

At Monday’s ceremony, he read tearfully from a letter penned to his infant daughter Ella, who toddled in the aisles as he spoke.

Wharton, an attorney who is also gay, praised the election of a majority queer, majority-minority and now, majority female City Council “to lead us through this, one of the more crucial times in our history.”

He called Salt Lake City “a place that defies expectations and punches above its weight, a place that welcomes people of different cultures, nationalities and faith traditions, a place that’s always been a little different.”

Wharton told his daughter she would hear someday about life in 2026.

“It’s not a time when everyone feels safe in our community or in our country because of hate, fear and greed,” he read to her, his voice sometimes breaking, “but there are so many of us that are working hard every day to make sure that truth, equality and justice prevail and that love conquers all.”

Having won a rare third term representing the council’s Avenues-centered District 3 in November, Wharton is now the panel’s senior member, followed by Dan Dugan, from the east bench’s District 6.

Petro, who works for the Utah Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, won a second term last fall. She is a Latina single mother of four representing the west side’s District 1 spanning Rose Park and Jordan Meadows.

After taking her oath surrounded by her family, Petro vowed to advocate for the dignity of her neighbors. Some of them, she said, are on edge over economic losses and raids by federal immigration authorities, leaving them nervous about being detained “because of the color of their skin.”

“I commit to rising to the occasion, not trying to simplify the problems or making someone else an issue,” Petro said, adding that she would also not react to a flood of “simple answers” typically on display via social media.

“There are no simple answers,” she said. “I have this radical notion that while politics have torn us apart, there is no good thing that can’t be accomplished through good policy.”

Carlsen, a Latina community organizer who is gay, takes over the District 5 council seat held by Darin Mano since 2020, after a decisive victory in November that saw her campaign break fundraising records. The district spans Ballpark, Central Ninth, East Liberty Park and Liberty Wells.

Addressing the crowd initially in Spanish, Carlsen, who was also joined by family, thanked her grandparents “for being immigrants.”

“Your dream, your work and the family you created,” she said, “was worth it.”

Carlsen then shared the Buddhist parable of a solitary parrot who gives her all to repeatedly sprinkle water from her wings in hopes of halting a great forest fire.

“We’re facing fires of our own,” Carlsen said, listing “the rising cost of living; homeownership that builds further and further out of reach; aging infrastructure; homelessness; water scarcity and saving the Great Salt Lake; small businesses that are struggling to stay cope.”

In the face of such challenges, she added, “it’s easy to think I’m just one person. What difference can I make? The point is that we try.”

Sarah Young, representing the city’s Sugar House-focused District 7, ran unopposed this election cycle to win her first full term after taking over for Amy Fowler, who stepped down in 2023. She also took her oath surrounded by several generations of her family.

Young, an educator, devoted a portion of her speech to heralding a Sugar House resident who had helped in 2018 to recruit more women and racially diverse candidates to the city’s Fire Department. She recalled on a 2025 ride-along seeing some of those same hires helping to comfort an elderly woman who had fallen in her home

“Because of these amazing women,” Young said, “she was able to receive help and protect her dignity.”

Young signaled some of the big decisions likely to reach the City Council in the next few years — a west-side homeless campus; improving Fairmont Park; working on what’s next for Smith’s Ballpark; and preparing for the 2034 Winter Olympics to be hosted in Salt Lake City.

But, she concluded, “it’s the small acts that take place across the entire city, valley, county and state of Utah that are really going to make the difference. I’m really excited to be a part of that future.”