Even knowing better, I craved signing the petition. It would feel so good.

The Salt Lake City developers hired people from out of town to shadow volunteer signature gatherers, and curating state legislation to their liking, taking advantage of questionable law to set up their own town, seemingly doing everything legally possible to foster their quest to build another big housing and mixed-use project near busy Kimball Junction.

Pretty much like every political campaign where rivals mean to win. With money and influence on one side, righteous indignation and innuendo on the other.

The Tech Center development that Dakota Pacific Real Estate aims to do on 51 acres near the Skullcandy building sounds just awful. The deal they struck with the Summit County Council after a fistful of years negotiating comes to this, which the council approved 4-1 while holding its collective nose in December: A 725-unit neighborhood and mixed-use development, including 364 of those units as affordable housing.

A little like pundits have noted about democracy and capitalism, the deal is horrible — only every other alternative is worse.

No wonder it has left the council and the community feeling helpless.

What could we do? Well, for starters, sign a petition. Maybe enough voters would sign to force an election in the fall. You know, take back some control. Maybe even overturn the agreement.

Too bad such a glorious victory would amount to a huge loss. Worse traffic instead of better. More homes instead of fewer. A denser development instead of the devil’s deal struck with the council.

But yeah, for a hot minute it would feel so good. Where do I sign?

As dilemmas go

Logically, this isn’t even a dilemma. The wise course in this case is plain. We’re talking tic-tac-toe, not chess, not checkers. If poker, all the cards are face up and we’ve played our best hand. The outcome is clear, unwinnable if winning counts as a sage field next to Walmart et al remaining empty.

The agreement takes the edge off maximum density, adds meaningfully to affordable housing stock, and is tied in each phase to road improvements designed to ease traffic, among other public amenities including an opportunity for senior housing. The list of public benefits may be imperfect, but it isn’t short.

The location is where you would want to put affordable housing and, absent the commuter congestion, a development like this if you had to have another one. It’s in an existing suburban area, at least, not some crazy outlier like Hideout, Hoytsville, the West Hills, say.  

The best choice under the circumstances is what the County Council worked out. That’s just the truth.  

Kick the can

But maybe my reasoning is too straightforward in a cause-and-effect way. Pragmatism often goes beyond the linear. The notion isn’t completely crazy that delaying the inevitable could well sap the will and the bank accounts necessary to carry through with the project.

Getting a referendum on the ballot and a chance to overturn the agreement in a general election at least demonstrates the community’s frustration. And it might help kick a can down the road, along with court challenges of the constitutionality of state legislation enabling end runs around local control.

Delay things long enough and who knows, the world may change, developers lose interest and/or the Legislature grow weary of encouraging projects that local communities don’t want. It’s also possible for a Utahn to win the lottery, though this state doesn’t have one.

My friends who justified signing the petition with this logic leaned into some awfully long odds, though. Maybe they are right, but this strikes me as a farfetched bet with a much higher risk of doing real damage.

Populist moment

The drive was a populist exercise during a populist era in our democratic republic’s history. Referendums lean into the direct democracy side of the model, on the theory that the wisdom of crowds should prevail, however ignorant the individuals forming the crowd.

For me, it’s a fascinating test case of the ever-present question about how much power the people should have to second-guess the representatives they elect to weigh out big decisions like this.

I’d argue California and Colorado, as examples, have amply demonstrated the hazards of too much direct democracy at the state level with their crazy quilts of referendums, and Utah tilts toward too little.

That’s all so much cool theory, though, arm’s-length academic philosophizing, ideally beside a fire with a singlemalt, neat. Still, recognizing we’re all living through a certain moment does give me some perspective on why so many people are infected with a strange fever to sign, to do something, anything that would plainly result in what they adamantly oppose.

There are more dangerous things over which to stampede in entirely the wrong direction than a land-use decision, of course. But I believe I know better and still the yearning burns to sign anyway, a metaphoric flipping of the bird, so satisfying. I suppose that here’s a clue in microcosm if looking back on history, you wonder how a people could have been so, so stupid.

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.