Each of you have a thousand things going on in your life, and now — on top of that — you’re being told you need to sign a referendum to save the county from a bad development (or developer).
You’re being told that this development will make your life worse by increasing traffic and bringing too many people into Kimball Junction.
But what if that wasn’t true?
What if signing the referendum will lead to a worse outcome instead of a better one?
As a former Summit County Council member and Snyderville Basin planning commissioner, I was a decision-maker on the Dakota Pacific proposal for five years. In that time, the development evolved significantly, beginning with 1,100 units and some light commercial to a public private partnership with an enhanced transit center, public gathering spaces, increased affordable housing, fewer total housing units, a capture lot, and other community amenities.
The approved phasing of the project is all tied to funding and improvements along the S.R. 224 corridor.
Many arguments against the project have indicated that S.R. 224 must be fixed first, before the project is approved. But the system doesn’t work that way.
The traffic in Kimball Junction is horrible and impacting the quality of life in Summit County. That is true. But UDOT is not just looking at Summit County. They’re looking at infrastructure projects throughout the state, and those impacting more people, that have more legislators vying for a fix, are funded first.
In a normal process, once a project is placed on the statewide infrastructure improvement plan (STIP), it is slated to be funded and construction begun within 20 years.
Some have argued that the state has to fix S.R. 224 in order to have a successful Olympics, but that is not the opinion of the Legislature. There are other ways communities have handled Olympics when they couldn’t enhance their infrastructure, including transit solutions, park and rides, and traffic enforcement.
State legislative leadership has told Summit County that the Olympics is not sufficient to fix S.R. 224 when there are other freeways and highways throughout the state failing every day for more Utahns.
With this referendum, it seems as if people are called to action by the emphatic statement that this development will make their lives worse. But have you stopped to question if that is actually true?
What if continuing to fight development is what ultimately leads to our community losing control of our evolution? The Legislature has been rapidly chipping away at local land use throughout the state for the past five years to deal with the housing crisis across the state of Utah.
I do not agree with their approach that more supply will decrease demand, but that is their current stance. And there are already bills drafted to increase their ability to spot zone areas for housing.
We have already seen the Legislature do that in other ways: MIDA, Inland Port, Utah Lake Authority. A referendum does not stop the Legislature from taking the land-use authority from the local government. It only ensures that the current project approved by the County Council, with all its public benefits and affordable housing, will not be built.
I have been in the room speaking with legislators and laboring over this project for half a decade, and if I am right, then your life will be worse off if you sign the referendum. You will still be stuck in traffic.
The housing in this area will still be built, whether by Dakota Pacific or another developer, and it won’t have the public benefits that were negotiated for years.
Malena Stevens served on the Summit County Council’s Seat C from 2021 through 2024.