KUER Events

Salt Lake City Mayoral Debate

KUER 90.1

Published September 9, 2023 at 8:14 AM MDT

PBS Utah, KUER and The Salt Lake Tribune are excited to announce the highly anticipated Salt Lake City mayoral debate, featuring candidates Rocky Anderson, Erin Mendenhall and Michael Valentine. The debate will take place Oct. 4 at 6 p.m., and will be moderated by Lauren Gustus, executive editor at The Salt Lake Tribune.

This engaging and informative debate will shed light on the vision, policies and plans of the candidates campaigning for the role of Salt Lake City mayor. The event is expected to draw a wide audience interested in the future of the city.

People will have multiple options to watch or listen to the debate live. Tune in to PBS Utah on channel 7.1 to catch the debate on television or listen live on KUER, 90.1. Also, the event will be live streamed on:

ASL interpretation will be available on all platforms and Spanish audio will be available on broadcast and on-demand via pbsutah.org. This will ensure that audience members have the opportunity to follow the debate in their preferred language.
The Salt Lake City mayoral debate promises to be a critical conversation, allowing viewers to gain meaningful insights into the candidates' viewpoints and plans for the city's future. The partnership between PBS Utah, KUER and The Salt Lake Tribune demonstrates a commitment to delivering a well-rounded and comprehensive debate experience to the community.

Don't miss this exciting opportunity to engage with the candidates and learn more about their vision for Salt Lake City. Tune in to the Salt Lake City Mayoral Debate on Oct. 4 at 6 p.m., airing on PBS Utah and KUER in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune.

A Note on the SLC Mayoral Debate:

It is standard journalism practice to be guided by candidate viability standards for inclusion in debates. This allows for robust discussion of a wide variety of issues by the candidates who are most engaged with the electorate. For example, the Utah Debate Commission sets a threshold of “10%, minus the margin of error” in a poll it commissions. This year’s Salt Lake mayoral race has not been the subject of public polling. In the absence of such, it is common practice for debates across the country to use the number of donors as the metric by which these thresholds are set.

The Salt Lake Tribune, KUER and PBS Utah set the threshold for this debate at 5%* of the total number of 2023 contributions for all candidates in the race. Based on the July campaign finance reports submitted to Salt Lake City, only two candidates met that threshold. Other benchmarks include an active volunteer corps, regular attendance at public campaign events and a policy platform readily accessible to the electorate.

* At the request of all three candidates in the 2023 Salt Lake City mayoral race, KUER, PBS Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune have reconsidered the application of their threshold for participation in the Oct. 4 debate. While we stand by those standards, we lacked transparency in communicating those to the public and to the candidates.

It is reasonable that the third candidate may have reached the threshold of 5% of the total number of donors to the race had the campaign been aware. We have thus invited his participation and he has graciously accepted.

This does not change our policy for future elections. We commit to making those standards public and reserve the right to amend them in advance of upcoming elections.