40 Years of City Weekly—Volume 40: 2023 to 2024 

As the calendar flipped to 2024, City Weekly was fast approaching its 40th anniversary since debuting in 1984 as a monthly newsletter. Inside and outside the newsroom, the milestone rang with echoes of the past and preludes to the future.

New offices in the historic Plandome Hotel building brought the CW newsroom back to 400 South—a stone's throw from its original downtown home. Salt Lake City was stepping confidently out of the shadows of the COVID pandemic, with residential and commercial demand driving a strong downtown recovery. And around the state, renewed Olympic fever rose with the likelihood of a 2034 hosting selection, promising a new decade of investment, change, scandal and controversy.

Inside the pages of the newspaper, dark skies were a recurring point of friction, as Heber Valley residents saw their governing bodies bend over backward to accommodate the wishes of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in lighting its new temple. Conservatives boycotted Bud Light over its collaboration with a transgender influencer, while Utah lawmakers lost their lids over a Utah Transit Authority bus decorated for the annual Pride Parade.

"Think of it: If children saw that bus, they could turn into drag queens," japed Smart Bomb writer Christopher Smart. "OMG! The 'woke' ideology is stamping out good conservative discrimination and pushing the notion that even freaks have rights."

Every week seemed to bring news of professional and collegiate sports, with the on-and-off-and-on-again relocation of the Bees to Daybreak and the leasing of Sunnyside Park for a new U of U baseball facility. And by the end of the 2024 legislative session, state lawmakers had signed off on nearly $2 billion in taxpayer subsidies to clean up areas of downtown and the west side with the aim of luring two professional sports franchises to Utah's capital city.

But state investment may prove—as always—to be a double-edge sword, with the subsidization tied to new land use authorities outside city control and burdensome reporting requirements levied against Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill, ostensibly to "protect the investment" into downtown.

Amid a wave of book bans, classroom gag rules and other efforts to make political hay out of public education, Connor Sanders interviewed Cathy Bigler, Salt Lake City School District's teacher of the year. Bigler described the toll that relentless attacks and controversy can take on educators and how those conversations miss what's happening with children in a post-internet, post-COVID learning environment.

"They just know a lot more about current events than I ever did when I was younger, or my students [did] back in the '80s," Bigler said at the time. "I think kids grow up way faster than they did back when I first started teaching. And I think that can really challenge them with their mental health."

Bianca Dumas, meanwhile, reported on tectonic shifts at Utah's liquor agency, which changed its name to the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Services (née "Control"). After long conducting itself as a punitive morality police, the moniker was meant to reflect a new institutional philosophy of actually trying to help bars, restaurants, breweries and distilleries survive, if not thrive.

"No longer will the department be hyperfocused on controlling every thought and action of those who sell and/or consume alcoholic beverages, leaders say," Dumas wrote.

The new DABS took steps to aid retailers through the licensing process and to put local spirits on a more-level playing field with national brands. It also began installing refrigerators in State Liquor Stores to sell what was previously unthinkable: cold beverages.

"The goodwill is there, and it is something we've never seen. What they're doing is putting customers first," said Michele Corigliano, executive director of the Salt Lake Area Restaurant Association. "They're not putting the 'control' as the focus, and they have been really great to work with. All my members have been ecstatic with what they've seen so far."

Despite being virtually unknown in state politics, Celeste Maloy won the primary election to replace Rep. Chris Stewart, who resigned mid-term from his heavily-gerrymandered congressional seat after a decade of passively kowtowing to the far-right elements of his party. And in city politics, former two-term Mayor Rocky Anderson emerged from a 15-year hiatus to mount a third run at City Hall, focusing his campaign on the issue of homelessness. But voters opted to stick with incumbent Erin Mendenhall, who easily won reelection over Anderson by a margin of more than 20 percentage points.

Mendenhall suggested that city voters were excited about the opportunities for Salt Lake's future, while Anderson chided the local media for failing to adequately inform citizens of the issues at stake and suggested he was unlikely to ever pursue elected office again.

"It's become a money game," Anderson told City Weekly. "The establishment basically has its way."

But the biggest recurring theme of City Weekly's 40th year in print was, fittingly, City Weekly's 40 years in print, as Wes Long (with an occasional assist by news editor Benjamin Wood) dove into the archives, Scrooge McDuck style, and exhaustively cataloged Salt Lake's highs and lows, as chronicled by the state's finest and longest-lasting alternative newspaper.

From its first days as a scrappy bulletin serving the members of over-regulated private clubs to the no-holds-barred weekly publication containing these very words, Long guided readers through a time capsule of the events, debates and notable figures that built what would become our shared history.

"When it comes right down to it," Long wrote on August 24, "Salt Lake City Weekly owes its existence to three things: a parched landscape for Utah's fourth estate, bizarre liquor laws and John Saltas needing a job."

Remembering Vol. 40: In thecSubmissions
In 2024, the broader news industry is in shambles and many fine publications have closed up shop while not-so-fine publications remain perched on a knife's edge of oblivion. While City Weekly has held on in spite of significant challenges, there's no denying the reduction of its masthead to a skeleton staff.

But we get by with a little help from our friends, and are proud to distribute quality reporting and commentary that might otherwise go overlooked by mainstream outlets. Through membership in the Association of Alternative Newspapers (AAN), City Weekly brought the annual Project Censored Top 10 list and Foilies Awards on government transparency to Utah readers. Plus, we've sought out local partnerships and outside freelancers to bolster our coverage, particularly in the time-consuming and specialized area of investigative reporting.

Taylor Barnes and Inkstick Media shared their investigation of worker deaths at Utah's Northrop Grumman plant, exposing workplace safety failures and a lack of accountability at one of the nation's largest defense contractors. Michael Lacey—founder of the Phoenix New Times—sounded an alarm over the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., while Michael Dean McGrady Jr. contextualized the First Amendment ramifications of Utah's attempts to regulate pornography out of existence.

City Weekly also featured several cover stories produced by Eric S. Peterson's Utah Investigative Journalism Project, like an examination of nearly $20 million in local police misconduct settlements reported in partnership with Erin Alberty and Kim Bojórquez of Axios Salt Lake.

"Critics question whether settlements increase accountability, since they don't come directly out of police budgets but are generally paid out by municipal insurance," Peterson, Alberty and Bojórquez wrote. "Access to justice is another issue, because challenging departments is not an easy legal proposition and not many attorneys will take on these cases unless they are high profile enough."

In the Streets
Construction on 200 South, 900 South and 300 West created headaches for readers, merchants and City Weekly founder John Saltas, who compared the 2nd and 2nd area to "downtown Baghdad" during a gas pipeline replacement that coincided with construction of the state's new tallest building, the Astra.

"Several businesses there have said they won't survive or must move, which won't matter a whit to city officials," Saltas wrote. "They know that when construction ends, a new business will take those spaces over. It doesn't matter to a city who pays the taxes, just that someone does."

In another column, Saltas drew a distinction between city plans for pedestrian, cycling and transit connections and the private utility work that stalled work zones for weeks and months at a time, well beyond the projections that businesses had been told to plan for.

"Most everyone is sick of it all and point figures in every direction," Saltas wrote. "Currently, most fingers point at the city."

With the departure of Bryant Heath from his popular On the Streets column, Benjamin Wood attempted to fill Heath's shoes for several weeks, taking a sharper tone against areas of demonstrable government failure, like South Salt Lake City's handling of the S-Line/Parley's Trail and Salt Lake City's longstanding prioritization of driving over all other modes of transportation.

"Walking is a very good thing—the more people who do it, the better literally everything works," Wood wrote. "But if you want people to swim, you have to build a pool, and if you want people to walk, you have to build a decent sidewalk. Utah's sidewalks, generally, suck ass."

On the Streets eventually gave way to Small Lake City, a new column featuring a rotating stable of writers. Throughout the rest of the year, the space featured local takes on Utah's obsession with fast-food franchises, transgender representation at the Utah Pride Festival, school dress codes, the proposed Little Cottonwood Canyon gondola and the emerging, highly-addictive street drug known as "Pickleball."

"I'm all for elders having other activities to enjoy besides writing paper checks at Maverick or spam-calling me to ask if I'm voting for (insert psychopath R-candidate here)," wrote Bill Frost on Oct. 19. "Unfortunately, my people—Gen X—have flooded the pickleball courts, and they're bringing the younger Gens with them."

In One Quote
"The more we can courageously open our lives to others, the easier it is to dispel the cynical myths and stereotypes that some people hold ... Humans are wired to make genuine and meaningful connections with people. We suffer when we are disconnected and isolated." (Equality Utah executive director Troy Williams, as reported by Carolyn Campbell in the Pride Issue on June 1, 2023)