home > newsroom ACLU of Utah Files Main Street Plaza Appeal FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 21, 2004 Salt Lake City, UT -- The ACLU of Utah filed legal papers today initiating the process that will result in a Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals review of the constitutionality of Salt Lake City’s relinquishment of a downtown public forum to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A Notice of Appeal was filed with the U.S District Court for the District of Utah which recently dismissed a request to maintain the public easement and access during judicial review and granted dismissal of what is widely known as the second round of the Main Street Plaza case. The current legal action, Utah Gospel Mission vs. Salt Lake City Corporation, began on August 7, 2003, and stems from the efforts of the City to accommodate the desire of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) to discriminate against public speech on the former public easement on the Main Street plaza. The plaza, where Main Street, Salt Lake City and LDS Church headquarters join, is the literal and symbolic intersection of church and state in Utah. In 1999 the City sold a block of Main Street to the Church. Because all public policy statements and documents emphasized the need for pedestrian traffic on this downtown grid, the City retained an easement for public passage and access. The Church placed restrictions on speech and behavior on the plaza. The ACLU repeatedly warned that the restrictions were not consistent with the Constitution. Eventually the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the easement was a public forum with attendant First Amendment speech rights and struck down the Church’s restrictions. After the Tenth Circuit’s ruling, instead of implementing the traditional “time, place and manner” regulations on public speech in sensitive areas, the City traded the public forum for cash and property elsewhere in town, disregarding its duty through relinquishment of public access and passage on the downtown plaza. The ACLU of Utah is asking the appellate court to review the decision of the lower court and determine whether the transfer of the easement to the LDS Church impermissibly occurred for the benefit of the Church and its desire to discriminate against people giving expression to ideas inconsistent with those of the LDS Church. “Salt Lake City has essentially impermissibly ‘privatized’ a central block of historic Main Street and thereby extinguished the public’s constitutional rights,” says Mark Lopez, national ACLU attorney who has worked on both Main Street Plaza cases. “The transfer of the easement has the effect of endorsing the Church’s message and creating second class citizenry for everyone else in the City.” “The lower court erroneously focused exclusively on a private property analysis and neglected to give full import to free speech and endorsement of religion claims which obviously weave in and out and all through the transaction which created the private church property,” states Dani Eyer, executive director of the ACLU of Utah. “Other courts have looked at the setting aside of stated public policy, and all the events surrounding such a transaction, and have pierced the fiction that there was a simple transfer of public property to the private religious realm for innocent reasons.” “Rather than assume its obligation to regulate this space, the City acquiesced to the demands of the Church and created a powerful platform for the Church to promulgate its message on a range of social, political and religious issues while prohibiting others from sharing their own messages on the same issues, in the same place, and in the same manner.” In the appellate process to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals each side will present written argument within the next few months and oral arguments will be held later this year at the earliest. The attorneys representing the plaintiffs in this case are Mark Lopez, at the ACLU’s National Office in New York City, and Margaret Plane of the ACLU of Utah in Salt Lake City. Read the Notice to Appeal filed on May 21, 2004 Go to the Main Street Plaza page --end--

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