DRAPER — A week after his faith in humanity took a pummeling, the part-time mayor of Draper is back to sniffing, if perhaps not yet outright smelling, the roses.
The cop car that was parked overnight in front of Troy Walker’s house is gone, lest any of those people who shouted the mayor down at the open house were actually as angry as they looked and sounded. Nobody followed through on the calls for impeachment and/or resignation. The kid with the LDS mission call to Mexico, who warned that if Draper housed the homeless it would end up looking like Mexico, is presumably still headed to Mexico.
Walker? He’s working his day job as a lawyer and doing the city’s bidding when he’s not doing that, fielding the usual calls about potholes, barking dogs, garbage collection.
That and still trying to figure out what happened March 29 at the Draper Middle School auditorium.
His first clue that maybe he hadn’t gauged the mood exactly correctly was when he showed up early and the seats were already full. His second clue was when people started shouting at him before he ever opened his mouth.
He had a plan about Draper stepping up and being the one place in Utah that would volunteer to house the homeless. There were two spots he deemed this possible. One, his first choice, was a shut-down juvenile detention facility adjoining the grounds of the Utah State Prison, the other was next to a gravel pit — both sites that no self-respecting developer would look at once, let alone twice. Let’s offer to bring homeless women and kids to the poor side of Draper for short, 30-day get-back-on-your-feet stints — that was the grand plan Walker wanted to run by his community.
Looking back, he can see his timing could have been better. His benevolent brainstorm came too late in the game, just days before the deadline for the county to make its decision about where to put new homeless shelters, and finding no enthusiasm whatsoever from the candidates.
“Every city was screaming hell no,” says Walker. “I thought, ‘We can do this. We can help. Why can’t we?’ No. 1, we’re a wealthy city with lots of resources; No. 2, we’re moving the prison, which puts us on the cusp of the greatest economic prosperity any community could hope to have. Surely we can take care of 150 homeless women and children on a temporary basis. At a place that’s empty and used to be a jail and isn’t next to anybody’s home.”
But he never got to have that conversation because no one heard anything he said past “homeless.”
The intensity of the opposition blindsided Walker. “I was floored by it; I did not expect the near mob mentality that was there.”
He wasn’t the only one. Rep. Greg Hughes, the speaker of the Utah House whose constituency includes Draper, had talked with Walker beforehand and supported him wholeheartedly in presenting his plan to the members of the community they both call home.
“We talk a lot. We’re good friends. I thought the community would see what good could happen here. I’m just so blown away what happened,” says Hughes. “I really feel I led my poor friend into this fray. His intentions were entirely heartfelt, and he ran into something way worse than anything that happened at South Salt Lake or West Valley or anywhere else.”
For further irony, Hughes points out that the school where the meeting was held sits on property the mayor worked hard to zone for so it couldn’t be eaten up by developers.
Hughes ticks off what Draper has going for it: “higher than average income, higher than average education, probably a higher per capita number of churches than just about anywhere — and then to see that angry mob.”
The mayor didn’t stand up to talk about raising taxes, about imposing martial law, about building a wall.
He stood up to talk about a homeless shelter for women and kids.
The hostile mood didn’t last, Walker is happy to report. “The next couple of days I probably had 300 calls from people saying, ‘Hey, we want to help, we’re sorry what happened.’ I still haven’t answered all the emails. Some of them came from people who were at the meeting and apologized. By no means do I consider what happened to be a microcosm of the community. The meeting just got commandeered.
“We’re certainly blessed out here,” he continues. “I live on a beautiful half-acre, I’ve got mountain bike trails a half step from my house. This community is full of good people, people who want to do the right thing at the end of the day.”
And, yes, he said he plans to still run for re-election this fall.
Meanwhile, on a lonely stretch of highway, across the freeway from the tranquil, beautiful part of Draper where the mayor and everyone else lives, a building that used to be a juvenile correction facility sits on a frontage road next to the Utah State Prison, vacant and abandoned, with no one to call it home.