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The bill that took away Salt Lake City’s ability to control many of its own streets stemmed from shadowy lobbying, a last-minute floor amendment and a mysterious paper signed by two professors at the University of Utah that was apparently written largely by artificial intelligence.
That’s according to new reporting by Building Salt Lake that uncovered exclusive details about the origins of SB 195, a bill that temporarily blocked ongoing efforts to make streets safer, more walkable and more vibrant in Salt Lake City.
The bill became a flash point toward the end of the session, as city officials were caught off-guard by last-minute changes to an omnibus bill and scrambled to try to save their authority to design and control their own streets, ultimately losing power after putting up a fight.
SB195 paused most ongoing work aimed at preventing people from being injured or killed on streets in Salt Lake City, added additional bureaucracy and ordered additional costly studies, and was based on a small group of powerful people’s desires to drive faster into, out of and around the city, Building Salt Lake learned.
Reporting shows that a paper signed by two faculty members of the University of Utah was being circulated late in the session while the bill was being debated.
The portion of the bill impacting Salt Lake City’s street planning authority was first unveiled publicly by Sen. Wayne Harper, R-Taylorsville, just minutes before a vote on the Senate floor.
Harper gave a brief overview of the changes he was proposing to make on the floor.
Most of his updates sounded like mundane legalese, the types of things that typically go into an omnibus transportation bill that’s nearly 4,000 lines long.
“We’re clarifying the hybrid vehicle EV fee. We’re putting that back into code. There’s a required road study in cities of the first class dealing with some of their transportation issues,” Harper said.
Except it wasn’t just a transportation study.
The change, which only applied to Salt Lake City, would block the capital city from implementing a broad list of changes aimed at making any of its streets safer or right-sizing roads that are wider than they need to be while the state conducted a study into past and future plans for the city’s streets.
The floor amendment also included other provisions that Harper didn’t mention in his summary, such as requiring UDOT to follow the phases outlined in its environmental impact statement for Little Cottonwood Canyon, which includes building the world’s longest gondola up the canyon.
The amendment was so deceiving, every member of the Senate Democratic caucus, several of whom represent Salt Lake City, voted in favor of the bill. After realizing what they voted on, they asked for and received permission to change their votes to nay.
What wasn’t clear was who was pushing for the bill, why Harper felt compelled to offer the last-minute and opaque amendment and ultimately what guided the final version of the bill.
Until now.
The Mendoza-Jansen paper
The portion of the bill targeting Salt Lake City’s streets came as a mysterious paper critical of Salt Lake City’s street safety efforts was circulating in the Capitol.
Emails obtained via records requests by Building Salt Lake paint a picture of how the paper ended up in the hands of lawmakers, and who were the ones that delivered it.
On Feb. 22, former Democratic Sen. Scott Howell, now a lobbyist for the billboard and real estate industries, sent a copy of a report to Harper.
Five days after that, less than an hour before the bill was to be debated in House committee, real estate investor Tiffanie Provost-Price sent a copy of the paper to Rep. Tyler Clancy, R-Provo.
The report was titled “Roadblocks to Quality of Life.” The 24-page paper was authored by two faculty members of the University of Utah: Daniel Mendoza and Mark Jansen.
Mendoza is an associate professor at the university who specializes in the health effects of air pollution. Jansen is a tenure-track assistant professor in the finance school. It’s still not clear who commissioned the report.
The paper was critical of Salt Lake City’s efforts at reducing the number of people who are killed and injured on its streets, though it’s still not clear whose ideas or research were included.
READ THE DANIEL MENDOZA-MARK JANSEN SB 195 PAPER HERE
An AI-detection service found that as much as 73 percent of the paper appeared to have been written by AI. Some passages, such as one that declares that speed humps increase vehicle emissions, was found to have been 100 percent AI-written.
The pair cited a paper from a student at the University of Cape Town. That paper focused on congestion impacts from suburban sprawl, and it proposed implementing traffic calming measures to improve quality of life in neighborhoods where suburban commuters were cutting through to avoid congestion.
Another section said that road diets — or removing excess vehicle travel lanes to repurpose them for wider sidewalks, bike lanes or bus lanes — were known to create congestion. The author of that paper, who was a student at the time, said his paper identified that no method for measuring potential congestion impacts from road diets existed and sought to establish one.
Alessandro Rigolon, associate professor in the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning at the U, said that the paper didn’t rely on systemic reviews or broad bodies of existing evidence to support their claims.
“Claiming as they do that there is an increase, a worsening of air quality, it doesn’t have grounding in systematic reviews about traffic calming,” Rigolon said. “Claiming it’s only a perceived benefit in terms of perceived safety is not true. There’s measured records of crashes and injuries.”
Most passages include no citation, including passages critical of public transportation and others that made questionable statements about the causes of congestion.
“If I had been asked to write a policy paper for the Utah State Legislature and this is what I delivered I would not be super proud of myself,” said Greg Macfarlane, a BYU assistant professor in the engineering school who reviewed the Mendoza-Jansen paper for Building Salt Lake.
The paper suggested that street safety efforts in Salt Lake City were the cause of increased commute times for the metropolitan area, though it provided no data for the claim.
It also failed to consider that suburban commuters were spending more time driving after the Wasatch Front boomed in population without subsequent investments in public transit or without any effort to prevent suburban sprawl that would directly lead to longer car travel times.
Several advocates and some affiliated with the University of Utah expressed surprise that Mendoza, an air quality and transit advocate who is also a member of Salt Lake City’s Transportation Advisory Board, would author a report that was used as the basis of a bill that will block dedicated bus lanes in the city.
Neither Mendoza and Jansen responded to multiple requests for comment or answer questions over the course of more than a week about the paper, AI’s role in generating it, who commissioned it, or whether they supported the outcome.
“Reading it, it’s kind of scary that this is the level of policy analysis that our legislators are taking seriously,” Macfarlane said.
‘Solutions Utah‘
Harper’s end-of-session attempt to pass the substitute bill came two days before he received a paper from former Democratic Sen. Scott Howell and sent it to the staffers who work with all members of the Senate.
Tiffanie Price and Howell are board members of a group that purportedly focuses on homelessness called Solutions Utah.
In a message to Building Salt Lake, Harper claimed to have never read or forwarded the paper.
“That paper, I have not read it and I have not shared it with other people,” Harper said. “Somebody sent it to me right at towards the end of session but I have not looked at it.”
But that isn’t true.
Emails obtained through an open records request show that Harper shared the Mendoza-Jansen paper with Senate staffers and Carlos Braceras, the head of UDOT.
Harper didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.
While the city was scrambling to preserve its power over its own streets, an unlikely group emerged to publicly support the changes.
Solutions Utah, a 501(c)3 nonprofit group that says it puts forward “constructive approaches to homelessness and a myriad of urban challenges confronting our modern cities,” told its followers to support the bill.
In social media posts urging its supporters to contact legislators in support of SB195, Solutions Utah appeared to copy the key points of the Mendoza-Jansen paper.
The group said that the bill would ensure that street projects don’t lead to “increased congestion, higher emissions, strains on economic development, emergency services [sic] delays, negative impacts on the quality of life in neighborhoods where residents live, work, play and worship.”
The group wrote that the bill was “data driven and focused on enhancing Salt Lake City’s vitality.”
After sending questions to Howell, Jan Hemming, a Solutions Utah board member, responded with a statement she said was from the board.
“Public safety is also at the heart of our focus,” the statement read. “It’s boldly stated in our mission statement. As public safety advocates we support policies that improve the vitality, safety and livability of our communities.”
When Howell emailed Harper the Mendoza-Jansen paper, he used the subject line “Vision Zero.”
That’s the title of the policy that seeks to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries. Salt Lake City is the only city in Utah to adopt vision zero as a guiding policy.
Vision Zero prioritizes safety, as opposed to traffic congestion and vehicle speed, within transportation design as part of the goal to prevent people from dying on city streets.
Howell didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment about his role in passing SB 195.
BSL reporter Jacob Scholl contributed reporting to this story.
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