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Erin Mendenhall

Salt Lake City Mayor

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Air Quality

Mayor Mendenhall has taken unprecedented action to improve Salt Lake City’s air quality.

Every Salt Laker deserves to breathe clean air, both outside and inside, and poor air quality is an existential threat to all Salt Lake City residents.

Erin was an air-quality advocate before being elected mayor, co-founding the non-profit Breathe Utah and serving as chair of the state’s Air Quality Board. She even went back to the U to earn a master’s degree in science and technology so she could bring additional expertise to her policy work. Air quality is the lens through which Erin views every issue.

There’s no quick fix for the Salt Lake Valley’s poor air quality, so Mayor Mendenhall came to office with the kind of multifaceted, long-term strategy you’d expect from an air-quality advocate.

REDUCING THE CITY’S DEPENDENCE ON POLLUTING FOSSIL FUELS

  • Because of a first-in-the-nation partnership negotiated by Mayor Mendenhall, Salt Lake City is finally on track to bring net-100% renewable electricity citywide by 2030.
  • Mayor Mendenhall is building an 80-megawatt solar farm in Tooele County to power city government buildings.
  • Mayor Mendenhall’s bold new Sustainable Development Policy required all new buildings funded with city dollars to be energy efficient and emission-free.
  • Mayor Mendenhall quadrupled the number of residents able to swap their polluting, gas-powered lawn mowers for clean electric mowers.
  • The Mendenhall Administration has begun transitioning the city’s gas-powered riding lawn mowers to an all-electric fleet to reduce pollution.
  • The city has added new electric-vehicle charging stations and is actively seeking outside funding for aggressive expansion. The administration has already identified 20 new station locations with the capacity for 75 more charging ports.
  • Mayor Mendenhall’s Air Quality Action Plan asks eligible city employees to work from home on low-air-quality days to help them refrain from adding pollution to the air.
  • With the state government abandoning its program to help commercial buildings finance energy-efficiency and renewable-energy upgrades, the Mendenhall Administration figured out how to take that program over and keep those projects moving.

ENCOURAGING USE OF PUBLIC TRANSIT INSTEAD OF PERSONAL VEHICLES

  • Mayor Mendenhall created the wildly successful Free Fare February program with UTA to help more drivers take public transit and leave their polluting vehicles at home.
  • Partnered with Salt Lake City schools to provide free Hive Passes to schoolchildren to encourage use of public transit.
  • Mayor Mendenhall has expanded the city’s public transit options to help more residents get around the city without polluting automobiles, with new TRAX stations and bus shelters.
  • Mayor Mendenhall partnered with UTA to launch two new west-east bus routes and offer on-demand service to help West side residents reach the city’s public transit system.

REMOVING CARBON FROM THE AIR AND GENERATING OXYGEN

Mayor Mendenhall is fighting back against our poor air quality by planting thousands of oxygen-producing, pollution-removing trees on the West side. Each tree will grow to generate half a million pounds of oxygen and take 20,000 pounds of pollution out of the air each year.

IMPROVING CITY RESIDENTS’ ACCESS TO INFORMATION

Mayor Mendenhall has partnered to install new air-quality monitors on UTA buses that crisscross the city to report in real time.  The city also partnered with the University of Utah to install seven sensors for black-carbon, which is a particularly harmful form of PM2.5 pollution. This neighborhood-level information will give residents a clearer picture of air conditions citywide.