Three Salt Lake City mayoral candidates came together Wednesday for their first in-person forum to discuss housing and homelessness ahead of the city's election in November.
Incumbent Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall is running for reelection against former Mayor Rocky Anderson and community activist Michael Valentine. It will be the first mayoral election in the city's history to utilize ranked-choice voting.
"We've called this an event a forum rather than a debate because we don't want this to be about people exchanging these interviews and scoring points on each other. We want this to be an opportunity for the candidates to shine a light on themselves and how they will address the serious issues of homelessness and housing affordability because that's much more valuable than having a noisy debate," Tibbitts told the audience, with a slight glance to the candidates behind him.
Valentine recognized himself as a "paradoxical candidate" who has experienced homelessness himself. Anderson pointed to his previous experience as mayor at a time when "Salt Lake City and Utah were seen around the nation as an example of what other states and cities should be doing for their chronic homeless populations," he said.
"I don't know of another mayor in any major city that has a homelessness problem like we do that keeps talking about all this is the state's problem," Anderson added. The outbursts prompted a public apology from Bill Tibbitts of the Crossroads Urban Center on Thursday which read in part:
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