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ARTS/ENTERTAINMENT
• Salt Lake City is giving $200,000 to 79 organizations in 2018 to promote neighborhood and community arts and cultural events. The ACE grants are given to organizations that promote diversity, inclusion, cultural identity and economic development.
• The Redevelopment Agency (RDA) of Salt Lake City has kicked off the Granary District Mural Grant Program, its latest public art collaboration with the Salt Lake City Arts Council. By funding local artists to paint large-scale artwork on the exterior of privately owned buildings in the RDA’s Granary District Project Area, the program will contribute to the beautification, diversification and economic vitality of the historic Granary neighborhood that was once known as the city’s heart of manufacturing. The program is inviting artists to apply for grant funds for site-specific artwork highlighting the Granary District’s character and history, visually engaging pedestrians and reflecting the city’s diverse artistic community. Along with a letter of interest and a visual proposal, eligible applications must include a written agreement between the applying artist and property owner of the proposed exterior space for the mural. The program is funded by $150,000 appropriated by the RDA board of directors. Selected artists will be awarded up to $15,000 per mural, depending on mural dimensions. Submissions are due May 17 at 11:59 p.m. Full application information can be found at http://saltlakepublicart.org/for-artists/calls-for-artists/.
ASSOCIATIONS
• Robert Farrington Jr., who led the Downtown Alliance from its inception in 1991 until 2009, died April 9. He was 66. He founded not only the Downtown Alliance but also the Farmers Market, Live Green, Lights On! and Salt Lake City’s First Night, and also served as executive vice president of the Salt Lake Chamber from 2003-09. He also served as Salt Lake City’s economic development director; adjunct professor of planning at the University of Utah; and in private practice at Farrington Community, Planning and Development, a consulting firm he founded with his brother Phil. Farrington came to Salt Lake City from Texas, where he had served as the director of the Downtown Owners Association of San Antonio.
ECONOMIC INDICATORS
• Summit County leads a Utah ranking of counties based on home closing costs as a percentage of median home value. The rankings, released by SmartAsset, also included, in order, Wasatch, Morgan, Salt Lake, Utah, Davis, Grand, Washington, Daggett and Cache counties. To calculate closing costs, SmartAsset assumed a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage on each county’s median home value and a 20 percent down payment. It also considered all applicable closing costs, including the mortgage tax, transfer tax and both fixed and variable fees. Summit County’s average closing cost is $5,164 and the median home value is $515,500. Cache’s average closing cost is $3,556 and the median home value is $224,600.
EDUCATION/TRAINING
• Western Governors University, Salt Lake City, has hired Deborah Eldridge as academic vice president over its Teachers College. Eldridge will lead program strategy, curriculum development, accreditation and licensure for the online Teachers College, which offers programs leading to teacher licensure as well as graduate programs for teachers. WGU's Teachers College has more than 20,000 enrolled students in all 50 states. Eldridge previously was a senior vice president at the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) and was engaged in teacher preparation as a professor of literacy education, department chair of curriculum and instruction at Hunter College and Montclair State University, an associate dean responsible for accreditation at Hunter College, and dean of education at Lehman College of the City University of New York.
EXPANSIONS
• Canvas by Instructure Inc., Salt Lake City, is now available in Canada. The open online learning management system is designed to make teaching and learning easier. Higher education and K-12 learning institutions across Canada now have the ability to access the full cloud-native Canvas LMS platform through AWS (Amazon Web Services) Canada.
GOVERNMENT
• The public procurement process to select concessions for “The New SLC” Redevelopment Program at Salt Lake City International Airport is about to begin. The request for proposals (RFP) for the first phase of The New SLC will be posted this month on Salt Lake City’s purchasing webpage at http://www.slcgov.com/purchasing. The first RFP will be for retail, news and gifts. Interested businesses must register on the Utah Public Procurement Place (UPPP) webpage — www.slcpurchasing.com — in order to download documents and submit a proposal. In May, the RFP for the food and beverage component of the first phase will be posted. An RFP for concessions in the second phase of The New SLC — to include the east build-out of the concourses — will be issued after 2020. After the proposals are received, an airport selection committee will review the proposals to determine if the submissions meet the minimum requirements before scheduling meetings with the top-ranked firms. The first phase of The New SLC will include a central terminal, the west end of two concourses and a parking garage. The first phase of the new airport will be completed in 2020, with the second phase scheduled to be finished in 2024.
HEALTHCARE
• HealthEquity Inc., Draper, has appointed Angelique Hill as executive vice president of operations. Hill has been a senior member of the company’s operations team since joining HealthEquity in 2012, and has led teams in consumer-driven healthcare operations and account administration since the advent of health savings accounts in 2003. Hill succeeds Jon Soldan, who left the company.
HOSPITALITY/FOOD SERVICE
• The Grand Summit Hotel, Park City, has appointed Chuck Randles to senior director of lodging operations for Park City and general manager of the hotel. He will be responsible for all operations at the newly renovated property and will oversee the neighboring Silverado Lodge and Sundial Lodge, as well as the opening of the new Lift and Apex properties currently under construction. Randles spent more than 12 years with Vail Resorts and most recently served as the general manager for Keystone Resort Property Management. Prior to that, he held various roles in both guest-facing and support positions, leading the front office and property management for Keystone Resort Property Management and as a staff accountant for the company.
LAW
• Snell & Wilmer has hired John W. Andrews for its Salt Lake City office as counsel in the firm’s environmental and natural resources practice group. Andrews has more than 30 years of experience in public lands, real estate, minerals and Native American law issues, including as a former chief legal counsel and associate director for the State of Utah’s School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA). Prior to SITLA, Andrews was a shareholder in the Salt Lake City law firm Van Cott, Bagley, Cornwall & McCarthy. Andrews currently serves on the Royalty Policy Committee for the U.S. Department of the Interior and is also trustee-at-large for the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation. Andrews’ education includes earning his J.D. from the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law.
• The Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office has hired Bridget Romano and Lt. Jason Snow. Romano will be assistant division administrator in the office’s Civil Division, focusing on civil litigation. She has been the chief civil deputy attorney general since September of 2015 and has had multiple leadership roles in her career. Romano graduated from the University of Utah College of Law in 1994. Snow is a legal investigator for the office. He has worked for the Salt Lake City Police Department since 1989, most recently as the assistant director for Intermountain West Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory.
PHILANTHROPY
• Customers, franchise owners and team members at Jersey Mike’s raised more than $6 million for local charities nationwide during the eighth annual Month of Giving campaign. The figure includes $53,208 raised in the Salt Lake City area for Make-A-Wish Utah. The campaign included 1,360 restaurants donating 100 percent of sales on March 28 to more than 170 charities nationwide.
• Squatty Potty, St. George, provided the means to complete two bathrooms at Habitat for Humanity of Southwest Utah’s 22nd home, located in Hurricane. The home recipient is Brandi Espitia-Lefler.
• Metropolitan Redstone Cinemas, at the Redstone Shopping Center in Park City, will host a 10-week Metro Summer Kids Movie Series June 12-Aug. 14 to benefit elementary schools in the local district. Local elementary schools can participate by selling tickets at a 50-percent savings, with the schools being able to collect 20 percent of the total proceeds raised. The dealine for schools to participate is April 20. Details are at www.metrotheatres.com.
REAL ESTATE
• A nine-property Codale portfolio that includes several Utah properties has been sold for $91.3 million by Holt Properties to an out-of-state publicly traded real estate investment trust. The single-tenant investment portfolio includes properties in Salt Lake City, Orem, Logan, St. George, Price and Vernal. Bryce Blanchard of Newmark Grubb ACRES represented both the seller and buyer. Also, a subset of the properties was simultaneously closed on by a local investment group. Codale Electric Supply has 13 branch locations in the western U.S.
• Castle & Cooke Mortgage, Draper has hired Mat Brumble to lead the company’s finance department. Brumble has 26 years of experience in the mortgage industry, most recently serving as vice president of finance for Academy Mortgage. Prior to that, he was the chief finance officer for Republic Mortgage for 14 years. In addition to his financial and accounting background, Brumble has also worked in human resources and capital markets.
RECOGNITIONS
• Portal, a student startup from Brigham Young University, won the $40,000 grand price and first-place title at the 2018 Utah Entrepreneur Challenge, a statewide university-level business model competition managed by the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, a division of the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. Teams competed for $100,000 in cash and prizes. Portal is developing a revolutionary way to open doors for wheelchair users. Other winners include second place for ProLink (Utah Valley University), third place for BayWatch Technologies (BYU), “Emerging Entrepreneur 1” for Electrochrome LLC (University of Utah), “Emerging Entrepreneur 2” to ScreenLog (Salt Lake Community College), Best Speed Pitch Award for Portal, and People’s Choice Video Prize for Electrochrome LLC. In-kind awards included Stoel Rives Best Technology Award for RhinoStasis (Weber State Univeresity), Snell & Wilmer Intellectual Property Award for Portal, and Espiritu Best Design Award for Portal. Additional cash prizes included the Actium Bootstrap Award for Maple Canyon Adventures (Snow College) and Jones Waldo People’s Choice Video Award for Electrochrome LLC.
• WeldSmart, a team from Westlake High School, won the grand prize and $7,5000 at the recent 2018 High School Entrepreneur Challenge, a program managed by the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, a division of the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. Teams competed for $20,000 in cash and prizes. WeldSmart is an idea for a welding hood that controls power to the welder to prevent arc flash. Second place and $5,000 went to AskManny App, from a Herriman High School team, and third place and $2,500 went to Tile Support Pedestal, from a Wasatch High School team. The competition received more than 100 student business-idea submissions from high school students throughout the state. The top 20 teams advanced to the final round, where they got the chance to pitch their ideas to judges. WeldSmart also earned the Intellectual Property Protection Package. MySTYLIST won the People’s Choice Award. The Wolf’em Stick Pro earned the Best Prototype Award. Seymour won the STEM Entrepreneur Award. AskManny App also earned the Top Online Vote Award. Scholarships worth $1,000 were presented to Jack Leonard, Geo Focus; Isaac Bromley-Dulfano, Water Widget; Kael Berkley, Tile Support Pedestal; Brennah Strange, Recovery Wear; Michael Jones, Castable; William Maloy, Retractable Road Reflector; Colin Pollard, Water Widget; Maira Howcroft, The Orca; and Sela Serafin, mySTYLIST.
• InsideSales.com, Provo, earned several honors at the recent AA-ISP (American Association of Inside Sales Professionals) Digital Sales Leadership Summit in Chicago. The company was recognized as the top service provider. Dave Elkington, chief executive officer, and Gabe Larsen, vice president of growth, were named on AA-ISP’s list of “25 Most Influential Sales Professionals.”
• Qualtrics, Salt Lake City, has been named the winner of the 2018 CRM Service Leaders in the Enterprise Feedback Management category by CRM Magazine. The 15th annual awards honor the leading vendors across nine customer service technology segments that have left an enduring mark on the industry in the past year. Recipients are determined through an extensive process and proprietary rating formula. The editors of CRM Magazine survey industry analysts and consultants for their impressions of the vendors’ offerings, company direction, customer satisfaction and overall cost. The Qualtrics Experience Management (XM) Platform is a single system of record for all experience data, also called X-data, helping organizations manage the four core experiences of business: customer, employee, brand and product experience. Qualtrics also has been recognized with the Temkin Group’s sixth annual Customer Experience Vendor Excellence (CxVE) Award. The award highlights organizations that help companies deliver superior customer experience through innovative products and services. Nominations are judged based on their capabilities, results and client case studies. The scoring also includes feedback from clients. Temkin Group is a customer experience research and consulting firm.
RETAIL
• Overstock.com Inc., Salt Lake City, has named Gregory J. Iverson as chief financial officer. Iverson previously served as CFO for Apollo Education Group Inc., where he had been employed in roles with increasing responsibility since 2007. Iverson has more than 20 years of financial; operational; and merger, acquisition and divestiture experience. Iverson succeeds Robert Hughes, who is retiring to become CFO of DeSoto Inc., a recently announced joint venture.
TECHNOLOGY/LIFE SCIENCES
• JJUMPP Software, Lehi, has hired Hal G. Halladay as chief financial officer. He will lead the company’s finance and people functions. Halladay has more than three decades of business experience and leadership, most recently serving more than six years as an executive at Infusionsoft, including as chief people officer. He also held executive roles in high-growth companies, including as CFO at Inari and chief executive officer of Northsky. He began his career as an investment banker providing financial advisory and growth capital in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. His education includes a B.A. in finance from the University of Utah.