It is good advice to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes and Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski say they’re friends, but they have been acting like enemies. For example, last week, when they had a brief, but very public, spat over closing a street in the Rio Grande district.
The street between The Road Home homeless shelter and Catholic Community Services Weigand Center did close on Friday — to vehicles but not to pedestrians — in order to create a “safe space” for the homeless population.
Mayor Biskupski is difficult to work with. She has clashed with her City Council multiple times, including the most recent episode where she refused to disclose new plans concerning a street-level TRAX extension to the airport.
But in this instance Biskupski was bullied in a loud and aggressive public tantrum. On Tuesday, and completely out of the blue, Hughes unloaded on KSL Doug Wright’s radio show that Biskupski refused to close the street, and was “leveraging” her power to do so in order to lower the city’s $10 million share of the operation’s budget. He later admitted that she didn’t do anything of the sort.
Biskupski immediately called in to defend herself. She said she wasn’t against closing the road, she just didn’t understand why it needed to be done immediately. She wanted to first conduct a legal review and get buy-in from the council and the public.
She had a point. If the state wanted this street closed only as a tool to constitutionally remove homeless campers from other parks and streets in the city, then she was right to question the closure.
The state calls it a “safe space,” but it seems more like a jail. Hughes said he wanted to erect a fence around the road and shelter and require a state ID-card to enter the enclosure to receive homeless services. Biskupski pointed out that The Road Home and the Weigand Center already have enclosed spaces that are safe. The state needs to more fully articulate why this space is necessary and what it is supposed to accomplish.
The purpose of Operation Rio Grande is to clear out the criminal element in downtown Salt Lake City in order to more fully assist those who are homeless and need services – law enforcement, treatment and shelter. Rounding up all the homeless people onto one street that looks like a corral loses sight of the fact that these are people, and they deserve respect. Let’s not treat them like animals.