Aaron Cheatwood grew up in Heber City with four siblings. As the town grew more, and more expensive to live in, he was only one of the bunch who stayed.
After preliminary election results show he will soon serve as a city councilor, he identified the need for affordable housing as one of the first issues he’s hoping to begin to tackle.
One of his brothers stuck around for years in a basement apartment and tried to put a down payment on a house. The goal slipped further and further out of his reach.
“Housing prices went up. The demand for his business … didn’t keep pace,” Cheatwood said. “They moved back to Orem.”
As Heber City approaches the future, Cheatwood said he wants to ensure its development is deliberate.
“We need to be responsible,” he said. “It’s not that the past council wasn’t. It’s just I’m going to be a voice for intentionality. Where are we putting density, and is that where it makes sense? Are we putting density near transit hubs? Are we putting density near jobs?”
And, he added, is the city listening to the concerns of its residents as they advocate for the preservation of different areas of open space.
“We can’t just continue to develop everything with no intentionality about where we want things,” he said.
He also plans to push for improved communication between the public and the council about other kinds of decisions as well decisions as well.
“We need to reach out to the public wherever they are and make sure they realize when things are very important, when we need their voice, when we need to hear from them and when they need to show up and be heard,” he said. “Then I think we can do a lot better job as a council to explain why we do certain things.”
He said the City Council often makes decisions people don’t understand because community members don’t always know or understand everything elected officials have learned about particular issues. Instead, constituents see councilors voting in ways that might not perfectly line up with their campaign values.
“If we take the time to say, ‘This is what I learned, here’s how my opinion has differed or here’s how I’ve learned more and understood the issue differently and this is what I decided. I think we can bring the public along a lot better, which is great,” he said.
If the city doesn’t deliberately make smart choices regarding what kinds of developments should go where and what open space should be preserved, he said it will lose the ability to carefully make those decisions.
While Heber City will continue to develop, he wants it to do so in a way those who call it home can be proud of.
And he wants those who call it home to be able to stay there if they wish.
Recently, his 16-year-old daughter expressed her fears that she too will one day be priced out of her hometown.
“She said something to the effect of, ‘It’s just stressful. I’ve got to keep perfect grades. If I don’t keep perfect grades, I won’t be able to go to college. If I don’t go to college, I won’t be able to get a good enough job, and there’s no way I’m going to stay here,'” Cheatood said. “The reality is even if she gets good grades, even if she goes to college, even if she gets a good job, it’s still going to be hard to stay here with the current trajectory that we’ve got. … It’s not something a 16-year-old should be worried about but she is.”