The Utah Legislature’s 2026 general session ended earlier this month, and Summit County officials are celebrating the passage of key legislation intended to bolster child-care services for working families.
“We’re really thrilled that House Bill 190 passed,” said County Deputy Manager Janna Young. “What this bill does is it responds to the County Council’s requests because each time I come before them and ask for more money for our child-care scholarship program, they ask, ‘What is the state doing? What are our businesses doing?’ … This bill shows the state has skin in the game.”
The county’s legislative committee collaborated with Rep. Jason Thompson of Cache County and Sen. Heidi Balderree of Salt Lake and Utah counties to create H.B. 190, as well as the Early Childhood Alliance, Park City Community Foundation, Policy Project and Park City Municipal.
The bill mirrors federal legislation that encourages businesses to offer employer-sponsored child-care benefits in return for a tax credit of up to 50%. Young said the county hopes the bill will help smaller companies to provide child-care relief to employees rather than rely on private facilities or scholarship programs.
“We also wanted to expand it beyond just the construction of facilities,” Young said before the general session. “For instance, if they decide to contract with a provider at a subsidized rate for their employees or if they hire an intermediary to help them navigate these different tax credit opportunities, then we wanted them to qualify for that.”
Young said the county is celebrating other wins from the general session, too, but those successes stem from bills that failed to pass. She specifically mentioned H.B. 231, which would have repealed the restaurant tax the county uses to fund one of its grant programs and replaced it with another sales tax.
“We wanted to keep the restaurant tax in the restaurants because in our community, unlike others in the state, about 72% of our patrons in restaurants are visitors, so they’re the ones paying that tax,” Young said. “The economic philosophy of the bill’s sponsor was, ‘We want to reduce the rate and expand the (tax) base,’ which works in a lot of situations, but it would have been detrimental.”
If implemented, the sales tax would have raised prices on essentials, like diapers and toilet paper, for Summit County residents. Young said that was not a move the county supported, considering that the County Council has already authorized two new local sales taxes in the past two years.
“We were concerned about putting the burden on our residents, particularly because the funds from that tax would have still been restricted to the same things the restaurant taxes are restricted to, which is focused on tourism,” Young said. “Why are we charging our residents for programs that are to encourage tourism? We were happy to see that fail.”
Young also said the county was glad H.B. 457, which would have classified Summit County as a “metropolitan growth county” because of its proximity to Salt Lake City, did not pass, saying it would have created more work for the Planning Department.
“From that perspective, we’re happy that we don’t have to be labeled a metropolitan growth county and create urban reserve areas in our general plans and do all these assessments and analysis and planning,” Young said.
However, Young said the state Legislature will likely study the bill in depth during the interim session later this year because Ivory Homes and the bill’s sponsors want to require cities and counties to plan for future growth.
“It makes sense to understand what our limitations are in terms of infrastructure, water and sewer,” Young said. “It is probably a useful exercise, but what we wouldn’t want it to do is require us to facilitate development in a way that doesn’t work with our general plans or our codes or the strategic priorities of the County Council.”
Young said the biggest disappointment of the session for Summit County was H.B. 510, which failed to pass in the state Senate by one vote. Rep. Tiara Auxier, who represents parts of Summit County, sponsored the bill as an attempt to place guardrails on the preliminary municipality process.
Preliminary municipalities can transition to, and incorporate as, a town under a state law that went into effect in 2024. The law amended the Utah Municipal Code to provide for a pilot program for the incorporation of a preliminary municipality, giving “all the powers and duties” of a town, including zoning and land-use decisions.
The law applies to land privately owned by three or fewer people who intend to develop it with at least 100 people while meeting certain affordable housing benchmarks in the first five years of the preliminary municipality’s existence.
Dakota Pacific Real Estate last year filed for a preliminary municipality in Summit County, dubbed Park City Tech, as a safeguard for its planned development in Kimball Junction. Ivory Homes similarly submitted a request in January to explore a preliminary municipality in Browns Canyon, but the Lieutenant Governor’s Office ultimately declined to move forward with the proposal.
H.B. 510 would have required the sponsors of a preliminary municipality to work directly with the county where the development is being proposed, especially in regards to the mandated feasibility study, which determines whether the municipality would be financially successful enough to proceed.
“The challenge is if their town fails, then it falls on the county,” Young said. “Her bill would have included the county in applications earlier in the process. Applicants would have had to notify the county if they were interested in doing this, and they would have had to work in good faith with us on various things. There were also some warranty and bond provisions that would have protected the county if the town should fail.”
Young said development companies and the Lieutenant Governor’s Office, which oversees the preliminary municipality process, had concerns about H.B. 510. She said there were also changes to the bill’s language regarding short-term rentals that the county did not agree with because of how many stakeholders participated in negotiations.
“I was impressed that the representative was able to get it as far as she did, and we were disappointed that it failed,” Young said. “In general, it probably would have been a pretty positive thing for counties, so we’ll have to see if she brings it up again next session.”
The interim session typically occurs over the summer, but no specific dates had been announced as of Tuesday afternoon.