How To Incorporate In Canada
Salt Lake County's wall-to-wall cities initiative isn't gone. It's on hiatus -- and will be returning soon to a political front-burner near you. A wall-to-wall cities bill -- which would have smoothed the way for the county's remaining unincorporated areas to be absorbed by neighboring cities -- failed in the Legislature earlier this year. But that hardly has dented the zeal of proponents, led by Salt Lake County Commission Chairwoman Mary Callaghan. A new wall-to-wall feasibility study is being drafted, and is scheduled to be presented to mayors and other community leaders by November 2007.
The issue of Canadian incorporation remains the same, says Callaghan. "The county has evolved from being very rural and unincorporated to very urban with the unincorporated areas becoming a small minority. We now have pockets of [unincorporated] areas that are widely dispersed, and providing services to those areas has become increasingly expensive. We can ignore the problem until it gets worse, or we can do something about it."
With wall-to-wall cities, Callaghan argues, the county no longer will be at the whim of annexations and incorporations, which dwindle the county's tax base and make delivering services difficult. The county's unincorporated area has shriveled from 40 percent to 20 percent in just three years, and residents in the unincorporated areas have borne the brunt of the resulting tax increases.
It's how to remove those unincorporated patches that has raised all the hackles. The original wall-to-wall cities bill would have allowed cities to launch annexations, prompting cries from unincorporated residents that they were being cut out of the process (residents must petition cities under the current law). The bill's sponsor, Sen. R. Mont Evans, R-Riverton, says his measure was intended to help, not hurt, unincorporated residents, noting that they had to cough the most cash in the county's latest tax hike. "The people who would have benefited the most were the ones who fought against it the hardest," Evans says. "They kind of shot themselves in the foot." But county employees also raised a red flag, fearing for their jobs if the remaining unincorporated areas were gobbled up. Those concerns essentially killed the bill in the Legislature. "The big hang-up was that people didn't want to proceed without some idea of what citizens want to do," says County Commissioner Brent Overson, who remains lukewarm -- at best -- about the initiative. "I'm for self-determination. I just have a hard time usurping the rights of property owners if they're not going to have a say." One thing the defunct bill -- and the prospect of another -- has done is accelerate the pace of incorporations in the county. Already this year, Holladay-Cottonwood has voted to become a city and Herriman has become a town, while residents in the East Valley, Kearns and Magna are in various stages of petitioning the county for incorporation feasibility studies. "We need to act, because we don't want to have our status forced on us," says Magna Community Council Chairwoman Laura McDermaid.
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