Rocky’s Road to Progress

He’s a confessed rabble-rouser, the incarnation of everything you think Utah isn’t. Truth be told, there are those who still can’t reckon how Rocky Anderson got himself elected mayor.

He’s a lapsed Mormon, twice divorced. Former president of the American Civil Liberties Union board, anti-death penalty activist, Democrat. Marshal of the gay pride parade. A fan of the Dalai Lama, the Kennedy brothers and artist Peter Max.

Nothing in town screams so inarguably of an evolved, edgier Salt Lake City as its mayor. A self-described “boyish 50,” Anderson shares a house on the edge of the University of Utah campus with his son, a college freshman. He drinks beer. He plays electric guitar. He dates. He doesn’t exactly speak his mind--he lays it down as edict. He sees himself as a necessary, modernizing force in this old-fashioned wash of Rocky Mountains.

And he makes some people awfully uncomfortable.

“He’s not in step with his own culture,” said Christopher Smart, a longtime friend and editor of City Weekly newspaper. “And he wants his own way--all the time.”

On the wall of Anderson’s office hangs a quote from Dante: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.” Then there’s the framed cartoon from the local paper, in which an ink-line mayor leans against the ropes of a boxing ring, massive southpaw held aloft. “He’s got a mean left,” the caption reads.

In the two years since the onetime plaintiffs’ lawyer was elected mayor, he’s turned his attention to loosening the city’s famously stringent liquor laws. He banned discrimination based on sexual orientation and struck up a therapy program for prostitutes and johns. In a town geographically and spiritually arranged around the looming Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple, he’s clashed with the church on questions of free speech and booze.

“He’s a Robin Hood kind of guy, you know?” said Brent Laws, an environmentalist who’s known Anderson since high school.

There are plenty who don’t agree. Anderson has been criticized by city and state leaders for lack of decorum, for plowing ahead single-mindedly, for his tireless ambition to change, update, replace.

As Anderson would be the first to point out, Utah is more complex than one might expect: The landscape is laced with ancient Native American and more recent Latino threads, salted by years as a rough-and-tumble mining outpost. Still, it’s the Mormon culture that etched the deepest mark in this stunning stretch of mountain and snow. This is a place where public officials can still light a scandal by uttering a mild curse word, a state notoriously fond of its guns. And despite the Olympic floodlights, plenty of people would prefer to remain unknown, unseen and old-fashioned.

“There are people in the community,” said Utah ACLU Executive Director Carol Gnade, “who aren’t interested in anything progressive.”

Showdown Over Highway Project

Salt Lake City is something of an island, Anderson insisted. Just about half of the city’s residents consider themselves Mormon--a notable drop from the statewide figure of 70%. And unlike the rest of the state, the politics here lists to the Democratic side.

In the turreted, Romanesque rise of gilt and marble that serves as City Hall, Anderson wears his disdain for the Utah Legislature on his sleeve. The lawmakers are “right-wing, reactionary, mean-spirited,” the mayor said. Last week, between Olympic galas and glad-handing and snowboard races, he managed to churn up a very bitter, very public argument with the state.

It all started last year, when Utah tried to build a 120-mile highway in the northern portion of the state, from Nephi to Brigham City. Anderson chafed. The freeway represented a lot of things he doesn’t like: smog, sprawl, concrete near rare wetlands. He sued the state, and an appeals court ordered the construction frozen. Last week, the Legislature threatened to seize the city’s Olympic sales tax revenues in payback for the costly delays.

The mayor was enraged--but he didn’t flinch. As newcomers flood the ragged Wasatch Range, Anderson said, Utah and the rest of the West must look for unconventional ways to grow. “Another road is not the answer.”

It’s the mayor’s rare intractability that charms his friends--and irritates his enemies.

“It’s important to know who you are and who you’re not,” said Nancy Saxton, a city councilwoman whom Anderson names as his toughest opponent. “As the mayor, you’re not the president and you’re not going to solve the problems of the world.”

That doesn’t stop Anderson from trying. He putters around town in a Honda fueled by natural gas. He began a clean-air program to bring Salt Lake City into compliance with the Kyoto, Japan, global warming accord--and complains vociferously over the White House’s failure to join the treaty.

The youngest child in a Mormon family in Ogden, Anderson slept through church services for years. By his late teens, his “fade out” was complete. “I don’t consider it a falling out. I consider it an evolution.”

As a philosophy major at the University of Utah, Anderson was dazzled by the great political thinkers, by David Hume--”for the richness of writing and intellectual aspects,” the mayor said last week. “The man was a genius. Did you know he was 23 when he wrote his ‘Treatise of Human Nature’?” Anderson sipped at his coffee, screwed up his face and interrupted himself.

“This coffee is really, really bad,” he said, loud enough for his aide to hear from the next room. “I mean,” he said, leaping to his feet, striding from the office, “it’s really bad.”

Critics say the tireless mayor makes for a difficult boss. Anderson has had four communications directors and three chiefs of staff. At least 15 employees have been fired or quit. These days, the turnover rate is something of a joke.

“I don’t think anybody’s quit in the last few weeks,” the ACLU’s Gnade said, squinting across a table at Smart. It was lunchtime, and the two bent over bowls of soup in a Salt Lake City cafeteria.

“You’d need a scorecard,” the newsman replied with a shrug.

Anderson is unapologetic. “I’ve gotten a lot of heat for terminating people, but I think the public deserves the very best. I’m easy to work for when people are really committed.”

A Good Degree of Drifting

It took Anderson some years of drifting to find the work he loved. After college, he began graduate studies in philosophy, then dropped out.

Anderson built fences in Idaho, drove a lumber truck and worked in a methadone clinic before crossing the Atlantic to wander Europe.

The return from those “magical” months to a post-Nixon America was a hard letdown: The United States seemed lackluster and undignified. Anderson waited tables, then hitchhiked to San Francisco, where he was inspired by an Amnesty International speech about the fall of Salvador Allende in Chile. Bent on taking up international law, he headed off to George Washington University law school.

Degree in hand, Anderson came home, found a house in the mountains and began two decades of trial law. He argued malpractice for plaintiffs, moved from firm to firm and took on pro bono prison rights cases.

In 1996, he made an unsuccessful run for Congress. Three years later, he ran for mayor. With 11 candidates vying in the open primary, the Mormon vote was split between two hopefuls, University of Utah political scientist Dan Jones said.

Anderson managed to piece together enough of the non-Mormon vote to get into a runoff with another Democrat. He defeated Stewart Reid, the city administrator, 60% to 40%, and moved into the mayor’s office.

“People feel like they’re getting their money’s worth with him,” Jones said. “People outside of Salt Lake City have a difficult time with him because he’s willing to take on issues that are unpopular.”

“I don’t think many of the mainstream Democrats expected to ever see this in their lifetime,” Councilwoman Saxton said.

Last week, when a trio of city officials from the Swiss capital, Bern, filed into City Hall to hear about Olympic pitfalls, Anderson was their unorthodox host. He spoke briefly about security, demonstrators and budgets. Then, with a slight wince, he slid a key to the city across the table.

“If you can find the lock, you let me know,” the mayor said sheepishly. “But, uh, it’s a nice symbol, anyway.”

Formalities dispensed, Anderson led the men into a back room to view his prized possession: a splashy, four-frame portrait of John F. Kennedy by Max.

“I visited his studio,” the mayor told another visitor. “He’ll have, like, Led Zeppelin on and just be cranking.”

Outside, in a somber corridor lined with onyx panels and oil portraits of mayors past, Anderson’s staff snapped open crates of scotch, vermouth and vodka. The mayor was throwing another party.

Before they marched back out into the frigid Rocky Mountain dusk, one of the men from Switzerland turned to the mayor.

“We know you are trying to change things here,” he said. Anderson grinned behind his Armani eyeglasses. Later, he’d repeat the remark to his staff. “Did you hear that?”

It’s exactly how he’d like to be known.

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Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this report.