South Salt Lake
I wake up every morning thinking, ‘What else can we do to make our city better?’” Cherie Wood, the Mayor of South Salt Lake’s roots run deep. Born and raised on Burton Avenue, she recalls childhood evenings when her best friend’s father - the mayor at the time - would invite them along to “put the city to bed.” Riding through the quiet streets, she saw her community not as a set of buildings, but as a living, breathing place filled with people who mattered.
The Mayor attended elementary school on the very grounds where City Hall now stands, then Granite Park Junior High and Granite High School, just like her mother before her. After Granite High closed in 2008, it became a personal mission for her to help strengthen the city’s schools.
Cherie began working for the City in March 1993. Over the years, she worked in many departments - utility billing, payroll, accounts payable, business licensing, and Community and Economic Development. She pursued her education at night, earning dual bachelor's degrees in business management and business administration in 2007 from the University of Phoenix’s Utah campus, after attending Salt Lake Community College and the University of Utah, all while working full-time. That accomplishment was the result of years of determination while raising her children. “I was plugging along,” she recalls, describing how she applied for every bit of tuition assistance she could find, worked full days, took night classes, and balanced life with two young boys.
In 2006, Cherie was appointed Chief of Staff to the mayor, a role that gave her a clear view of how city leadership could shape a community’s future. When that mayor decided not to run for re-election in 2009, he encouraged her to run. At first, she hesitated - politics could be brutal, and she had a young family - but the opportunity to directly influence the place where her children were growing up was too important to pass up.
Cherie was also navigating the gendered realities of campaigning. She had read in a campaign guidebook that a man could knock on doors with a child in tow and be seen as a hero, but a woman would be questioned about her preparedness. She refused to hide her children during the campaign - they were, after all, her reason for running. People wondered if she was qualified. She was breaking the glass ceiling as South Salt Lake’s first female mayor.
Elected in November 2009 and sworn in January 2010, Cherie hit the ground running. Having worked for the City, she had watched other mayors try different approaches to solving problems. Now it was her turn for a deep dive. Established in 1938, South Salt Lake had long been its own city, but it was not well-known and did not have a strong reputation. She began asking: how can we change this?
One answer was clear: the city lacked a true downtown or Main Street. Mayor Wood saw a “pathway through the community” - an opportunity to build a vibrant center anchored by transportation. At the time, there were over half a million car trips daily through the small area where I-15, I-80, State Street, and 2100 South intersected. With the S-Line streetcar and TRAX expansion coming, the location made sense for a long-term plan. She envisioned a fifty-year development that would be dense, walkable, and designed for the future.
The Mayor’s vision was also shaped by a deepening commitment to the city’s diverse residents. In the early 2000s, South Salt Lake became a refugee resettlement area. In 2007, tragedy struck when a young refugee girl was kidnapped and murdered. Remembering the loss, and the impact on the community, led the Mayor to take a step back and think harder about how to serve all residents, particularly those newly arrived in the community.
Inspired by a 2011 visit to the Harlem Children's Zone in New York, the "cradle to career" initiative, Promise South Salt Lake was established to ensure every child's success. In 2012, Mayor Wood began expanding after-school programs, collaborating with the Granite School District and actively pursuing grants. Today, Promise SSL serves over 2,000 K-12 students with high-quality programs that include meals, homework tutoring, and a variety of enrichment activities. The Mayor states that Promise is her favorite part of the job, saying, "Seeing kids have the opportunity to thrive and be successful - that’s what it’s all about.”
Mayor Wood's days are never the same. As a full-time CEO/CAO - the form of government South Salt Lake operates under - she begins each morning assessing the biggest issues at hand, often likening herself to a firefighter. One day it is housing, the next transportation, then economic development. She is continuously doing her best to put out whatever fire pops up next. She is equally passionate about small businesses, working to connect high school students to internships, developing the workforce, and fighting to protect the unique character of the city. “We’re not trying to be a city we’re not,” she says. “We embrace the small and the gritty.”
The Mayor has faced challenges. For eleven years, she was paid the same wage, often treated differently simply because of her gender. “Thank goodness I love this city,” she says. She has made it a priority to ensure women are at the tables where decisions are made. Today, there are more women on the City Council than when she began, and her cabinet and boards are both gender-balanced and diverse. She works to make meetings safe spaces for discussion with the belief that every perspective adds value. “We’re a little city, but we’ve done big things because we solve problems together.”
Approachability is central to her philosophy. “I want to be approachable, not have people feel intimidated by me.” She rejects the notion of having all the answers, instead creating a space where others feel comfortable speaking up. “All issues are multi-dimensional - the best solutions come when we put everything on the table.”
As of August 2025, the Mayor has completed thirty-three years of service with the City of South Salt Lake and is concluding her fourth term as mayor. Her dedication remains unwavering. “I’m just like everyone else who lives here,” she says. “I just happen to have the title of mayor. And I care deeply about this city and the people who call it home.”
"South Salt Lake is a diamond in the rough. People do not give it enough credit," Tereza Bagdasarova shared with a spark in her eye. "But once someone gets to know South Salt Lake, there's a passion behind just continuing to be a part of that community."
Tereza has been the President and CEO of the South Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce since the summer of 2024. She is also a City Planner. Her dual roles give her a unique and powerful vantage point to support small businesses while helping shape the future of the city she deeply loves. She grew up nearby, attending a school that borders Millcreek and South Salt Lake. Her early exposure to the diversity and strong community spirit of the area left a lasting impression. Her second-grade teacher, in fact, is now a South Salt Lake council member. From volunteering with Promise South Salt Lake to working with United Way, Tereza has always found herself pulled back into the orbit of this underappreciated yet vibrant city.
South Salt Lake only spans about seven square miles, but as Tereza explained, it grows to three times its population during the day because of the immense number of people who commute in to work. As she put it, "We're a city on the move." She proudly uses this phrase because of the transportation networks like TRAX that run through the city, the high density of industrial businesses, and the city's continuous efforts to create a space where people can live, work, and play.
The iconic South Salt Lake water tower is a visual anchor for the city - and a point of pride. Located above Level Crossing Brewing Company and featured in several logos including the Chamber's, the tower symbolizes South Salt Lake’s roots in industry and the arts. This is showcased through the city’s burgeoning creative industries - film production companies, breweries, distilleries, artists, and music spaces - tucked inside unassuming warehouses. What may look gritty on the outside holds magic within.
South Salt Lake’s creative community has coalesced into an initiative called Creative Industries, where approximately sixty creators - ranging from coffee shop owners and visual artists to musicians and filmmakers - are celebrated and supported. Studio tours offer a behind-the-scenes look into these spaces. One example, Space and Faders, appears nondescript from the outside but reveals a vibrant interior filled with soundproof rooms for musicians, rehearsal areas, and memorabilia from major touring acts. It even hosts monthly drum sheds, where professionals and novices alike can gather and play together in a circle of full drum kits. Another featured business, 1513, is a film production company working with major clients like Adobe. These events are designed to engage people who might not typically attend Chamber functions - young creatives, entrepreneurs, and those curious to explore their potential career paths. For Tereza, it is about finding meaningful ways to connect.
Among the city's greatest strengths is its diversity. One junior high school has over forty languages spoken among its students. This diversity is not just demographic. It is embedded in the fabric of the city’s services. Mayor Cherie Wood, inspired by Harlem's Children's Zone, launched the Promise South Salt Lake initiative to tackle poverty and provide comprehensive support for families. Today, Promise runs multiple community centers, many located inside or adjacent to schools. These centers offer after school programs, safe spaces, meals, arts, athletic activities, and educational support.
The Promise initiative is built around three core goals: all children should graduate from high school with post-secondary options; every child should have a safe place to go after school; and all basic needs should be met. The programs are deeply embedded in the neighborhoods they serve. At Central Park, boxing is just one of many activities. At the CO-OP, residents can access free co-working space, professional development resources, and business programming. The Chamber is based in the same building, along with additional Promise-run after school programs just across the hall.
Tereza's connection to Promise is personal. She worked there before stepping into her current leadership roles, and she maintains strong ties to its mission. The initiative is not just about services, she says; it is about building relationships and giving young people a sense of what is possible.
That same commitment to opportunity fuels the Chamber’s mission. When Tereza stepped into the CEO role, the Chamber had minimal infrastructure. There was no social media presence, or clear membership benefits, and their website was somewhat archaic. Tereza recognized that it was not serving as a real tool for the Chamber or their business community. One of Tereza and her team’s first major efforts was to bring everything up to the digital age and then continue to build on that momentum. “Things had become stuck in an old routine and was not meeting the practical needs of local businesses.” Tereza’s leadership has changed that.
Tereza has restructured membership tiers to be more accessible, acknowledging that many businesses belong to multiple chambers. She partners frequently with other chambers across the region, from Salt Lake to Chamber West, because, as she puts it, "we all support each other - we just want our businesses to get customers and thrive."
Monthly Women in Business events exemplify Tereza’s new approach. Not every business owner can leave their shop to attend a breakfast, so Tereza brings the programming to them. Past gatherings have included a storytelling session and water-color class at The Workshop, a fireside chat at Sims Motorcycle Monkeys with co-owner Robyn Sims (who previously worked at the Other Side Academy), a tasting and discussion at Indio Coffee, where the owner created Indian-inspired baked goods, and empanada-folding at Square Kitchen.
As a City Planner, Tereza is involved in economic development, including efforts to establish a recognizable downtown area and promote placemaking citywide. One focus is on transit-oriented development zones, where the city aims to increase walkability, improve lighting and safety, and support storefronts in becoming more approachable. Addressing the "missing middle" in housing - those units that fall between single-family homes and large apartment complexes - is a key part of this vision.
Chinatown, meanwhile, has become a magnet for new businesses and one of the city’s most dynamic developments. It began under Mayor Wood’s administration and continues to expand rapidly. From 85°C Bakery Café to bubble tea shops and unique bakeries like Fluffy Japanese Pancakes, the plaza is a growing hub of activity. Tereza noted that even more businesses are opening within the plaza’s anchor grocery store. It is not uncommon for new business licenses to come in weekly.
South Salt Lake’s culinary scene extends far beyond Chinatown. The list of international eateries and food stores is long: G&H African Market, Karim Bakery, Oh Mai (Vietnamese), Old Bridge Café (Bosnian), Cozy Coffee (also Bosnian), Arbat Grocery (Russian and Armenian), Best Chicken & Ribs Greek Food, Contento (Mexican), Mediterranean Market & Deli, and more. Tereza keeps a spreadsheet of the city’s licensed businesses, which numbers over 2,000, including many home-based businesses she hopes to support more robustly in the future. And, when a new one opens, she is always there for a ribbon cutting ceremony.
The Chamber’s Business Education committee connects businesses with afterschool programs and schools, encouraging volunteerism, career exploration, and mentorship. Through an initiative called “Investing in Your Future Workforce,” Tereza wants companies to understand that today’s students are tomorrow’s employees. Her own path is proof: she began as a Chamber intern in college.
What ties it all together - Promise, creative industries, Chinatown, downtown development, and the Chamber’s events - is the belief that relationships build strong communities. "Once you know someone, you know everyone," Tereza said, describing the organic way that collaborations blossom in South Salt Lake.
Through her leadership, collaboration, and genuine love for the city, Tereza is helping ensure South Salt Lake is not only a place of grit, but of growth, innovation, and community. "We are very community-driven, very small-business driven," she told me as we wrapped up our conversation. "We don’t get enough credit for how interesting and fun of a city we are - but we will."
“This is actually the most exciting position I have ever had.” For Jody Engar, Arts Programming Coordinator for the City of South Salt Lake, her role with the South Salt Lake Arts Council combines everything she has learned in her professional life with her passion for community engagement.
Before joining South Salt Lake in 2019, Jody worked in retail as a multi-unit supervisor - experience that taught her how to juggle competing priorities, think on her feet, and manage people and events. After four years in the city’s Community Development department, she moved to the Arts Council in 2023 where she now runs arts classes for adults, oversees the Creative Aging program, and coordinates Celebrate South Salt Lake, a series of community-driven cultural events that highlight the city’s diversity.
“We are the most diverse city in Utah,” Jody said. “That is what makes us amazing. We have every ethnicity and every type of resident here, and that is what we love.” The Celebrate program awards mini grants to groups who want to host cultural events, guiding them through permits and logistics. From a Nepalese celebration of lights, to Brazilian capoeira performances, to the Utah Dance Festival, the events reflect the global makeup of the city.
The Arts Council also organizes major events like Craftoberfest, which showcases creative businesses, breweries, and distilleries, and Mural Fest, now in its eighth year, which has brought eighty large-scale artworks by top local and international artists to South Salt Lake’s walls. “Art unites the community,” Jody said. “It has given South Salt Lake a sense of pride.”
Sharen Hauri, the city’s Director of Neighborhoods, oversees facilities, parks, and the Arts Council as part of her department. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, she came to Utah at twenty-one “for the mountains” and built a career that combines her training as both an architect (University of Utah, 1995) and a landscape architect (Utah State University, 2000) with a deep investment in urban design and community building. She first worked with South Salt Lake as a consultant, designing community spaces and working on a campaign to save Granite High School, an effort that failed by just five votes.
Sharen’s introduction to the Historic Scott School property came in the late 2000s when the city purchased it from the county using redevelopment funds. The site’s history stretches back to the late 1840s, when the Scott family settled along nearby Mill Creek. They built a log cabin, then an adobe structure, and eventually a schoolhouse to serve the growing number of children in the area. The current Scott School building is the third or fourth iteration of that original school, constructed in the late 1800s.
When South Salt Lake incorporated in 1938, the Scott School, then part of Granite High School, was already a well-established community institution. In 1947, Utah’s pioneer centennial celebrations inspired the creation of the Pioneer Craft House, an arts and crafts organization dedicated to preserving pioneer skills. Under the leadership of Glenn Beeley, the Pioneer Craft House began operating in the Scott School in the 1950’s, offering weaving, pottery, woodworking, and other traditional arts to both students and the community.
By the early 2000s, however, programming had diminished and the nonprofit running the Scott School space was struggling. The city’s purchase of the property in 2009 came with the Pioneer Craft House as a tenant. The city and its program needs grew to take over the whole site, and the dire need to upgrade the buildings led to the next chapter. “We want to bring back the classes, the sense of community, the culture, and the history.”
Today, the complex is officially called the Historic Scott School Community Center and is part of a larger vision: to create an “arts campus.” The historic school buildings - currently under renovation - will eventually host expanded public classes, and events. and possible partnerships, like a “Men’s Shed” community woodshop or collaborations with local makers. Plans also call for outdoor artifacts, interpretive signage telling the story of the site and the city itself. The Redwood Building next door, recently remodeled, is home to the city’s Promise SSL Youth program, with a focus on arts education.
For Sharen, preserving the site’s history is as important as its future use. “This was the home of Granite High School,” she said. “It’s a place where people learned, created, and gathered for generations. We want alumni to feel welcome here.” The Arts Council board has formally added history and culture to its mission, so the building can serve as both an arts center and the city’s unofficial history hub.
Even during renovations, the Arts Council’s programs continue across other city venues, with Jody maintaining weekly poetry workshops and pop-up events. Longer-term ambitions include a winter international market, expanded creative aging offerings, and more opportunities for immigrant and refugee residents to connect through the arts. The current strategic plan will guide building improvements, programming expansion, and fundraising for construction.
Joseph Dane, the city’s communications manager, sees the transformation as “version two” of the Arts Council, building on the foundation laid by former director Lesly Allen, who launched Mural Fest and many signature programs. “We have so much great stuff that happened in the last year,” he said, “and now we’re ready to level up.”
Sharen agrees. For her, the Historic Scott School is a rare piece of South Salt Lake’s history that has survived waves of redevelopment and demographic change. With the right leadership and community support, it can be a cornerstone for the city’s creative future.
“What this building was, was a school 100 years ago. What it is now, is under renovation. What it will be, is an enhanced community center providing arts, history, and a place for people to come together.”
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