Election 2011: District 2 

Kyle LaMalfa

Before Kyle LaMalfa founded the west-side community’s People’s Market, or before he decided to run for Salt Lake City Council against three-term incumbent Van Turner, LaMalfa enrolled in the Western Leadership Institute with big ambitions.

“I was actually living in the attic of my buddy’s house, working at a ski resort in Park City, and I wanted to be a manager,” LaMalfa says. “I took [a class at the institute], thinking ‘Man, soon as I graduate, I’ll be a leader, I’ll be the manager.’ It turns out it actually changed my whole perspective on the world. I decided to quit my job and go back to school, and while I was going back to school, I started the People’s Market.”

From being a ski bum with middle-management ambitions, LaMalfa became a west-side cheerleader who is now campaigning to bring love back to the west side. Since April, the laid-back statistical analyst has walked his entire district and is now making a second lap of his neighborhood, talking to residents. When not walking, LaMalfa’s campaign vehicle is a delightfully dorky scooter, fitted on the front with his campaign sign.

“Now that I’ve been through once, I’m just going to the people that I missed—dude, I can cover way more ground on the scooter,” LaMalfa says, admiring his campaign wheels.

The message he’s scooting to west-siders is simple: schools, jobs and safety.

Soon, Salt Lake City will begin deciding how to allocate school-board members to represent the city’s population growth revealed in the 2010 census. “We’ve got half the kids here on the west side, but we’ve only got two of the seven school-board seats,” LaMalfa says, adding, “What fits for Indian Hills Elementary on Foothill Drive may not be same for all the refugees at Mountain View down here.”

Education, however, is also wrapped up in public safety, a major issue for west-siders. At one of the doors knocked, LaMalfa greets two rambunctious kids orbiting their mom and interrupting LaMalfa’s pitch.

“We got school tomorrow, so you should leave us alone!” the child says as his mother politely talks over him, explaining to LaMalfa that despite living across from Jackson Elementary, she doesn’t feel safe having her kids walk to school, so she takes them to Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School on the east bench.

“I wish I could feel safer,” she says.

Down the street, an electrician fresh off work gives LaMalfa an earful about the street’s woes, from the faded school-crosswalk sign put in at the wrong spot on the street to the shady characters at the apartment block down the street.

“I bought this house when I was 21, and back then I didn’t know the freaks don’t come out in January,” the man says. “As soon as the snow melted and the sun came out and flowers bloomed, it was like, ‘Wow, where did all these people come from?’ I’m sorry, you caught me on a sore subject. I’ve been in this neighborhood for 15 years, and nothing ever changes. Like, who’s responsible for the lights?”

“Your elected representative is the one responsible for turning the lights on or letting them burn out,” LaMalfa says of a recent budget decision to not keep midblock lights on.

While LaMalfa is proud to have gained the endorsement of the police union, he’s most excited for a business idea he’s hatched while working with local farmers at the People’s Market—a business-kitchen incubator, a kind of commercial kitchen co-op where people could share kitchen and refrigerating costs and also have a place to develop a line of food products, supported by grants possibly leveraged through the city’s Redevelopment Association.

“Everyone that’s down at the Downtown Farmers Market that sells some kind of cookie or jam or bread—if they’re just getting started it’s because they’ve got a ‘bro deal’ going on,” LaMalfa says of people who have a friend with a kitchen or a catering business that’s helped them make their product. “But for new arrivals, especially refugees, there are no ‘bro deals,’ especially when navigating the whole department of agriculture and the health department—it’s tough.”

LaMalfa feels good about the campaign. While he sees his opponent as a nice guy, he believes he can do better, especially to help engage west-siders, as well as the rest of the city, in learning more about festivals, shopping and other events that put the west side on the right side of the tracks in LaMalfa’s book.

While the community advocate got his start as a numbers nerd—he holds degrees in economics, statistics and sociology—he says representing the west side is his true passion.

“I’m a nerd about the west side, man,” LaMalfa says.