Jan. 2023 | Vol. 23 Iss. 01
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‘MY FOCUS IS THE PEOPLE, ALWAYS’ SANDY MAYOR REFLECTS ON THE PAST YEAR By Sarah Morton Taggart | s.taggart@mycityjournals.com
S
andy City’s first female mayor just wrapped up her first year in office. The City Journals sat down with her to look back on the challenges and accomplishments of 2022 and look ahead to the next 50 years.
What has surprised you about being mayor?
How expensive everything is to run a city. Until this year, I had no idea. When I was a council member my job was to set the budget, make sure the budget balances. But from the operations end, now as mayor over all the departments of our city, we’ve been hit hard this year by inflation, fuel prices, rising costs of labor and supply chain issues that have just sent our contract estimates skyrocketing. As a resident and even as a city councilmember, I used to look at some of our equipment purchases. A million dollars for a fire truck? That can’t be true. And then I learned. How did I learn? By going to the fire stations, doing the ride-alongs. I toured the manufacturing headquarters in Wisconsin where our last fire truck was custom built for Sandy. Everyone has a custom engine. This is how they do it. We have this urban/suburban/ wilderness interface, so a working fire truck
has to be a hybrid. It has to be a fire engine where it can pump water, it has to be ready for medical equipment. It has to be ready to get into tight neighborhoods like in Historic Sandy or parks and trails. So it has to be very nimble. That’s just one example. We’re known as a well-planned, very organized, professionally run city. Our contractor estimates, our road projects, bulk waste, asphalting, our water projects, all the estimates this year… normally you build in a 10% contingency. And then we cautiously bumped it up to 20% contingency. Now the bids for the jobs are coming in at 40, 50, 60% over estimates. So that’s something that everybody is experiencing when you go to the store. This same thing is happening, but on the city scale. So with over 600 employees and a $150-million budget we are turning over every couch cushion to find the funds to maintain that high level of services Sandy residents expect. That’s been our challenge this year. And then mayoral duties. When I was campaigning last year, I was working around the clock knocking doors as a grassroots can-
Local Postal Customer ECRWSS Scan Here: Interactive online edition with more photos.
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Sandy Mayor Monica Zoltanski poses in front of Sandy City Hall to cheer on the U.S. Men’s National Team during the 2022 World Cup. (Photo courtesy Monica Zoltanski)
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