With spring coming on and having just completed a rather taxing legislative session, it’s getting harder for me to sit down and write up something to post to this blog.  But today we got a skiff of snow and its cold and windy out, so… I have no excuse!

I have seen a couple of interesting pieces recently that have triggered my old brain, which will give me something to pass on.  I’ll do that over the next few days.

First, this piece from a resident of Erda in Tooele County, which has seen a lot of growth-related churn the last couple of years, not the least of which has been an ugly incorporation-annexation faceoff to control new development.  What I find so jarring about this piece is that it sounds just like what I heard early in my career in some Davis County communities (and others on the edge of expanding development) – “we like our rural lifestyle, we don’t want it to change, just keep those dirty rotten developers who only are concerned about money out of our pristine little community.”  Here’s a clip from the piece:

Must quality of life be sacrificed when there’s land to be developed? Are rural Utahns sacrificial lambs for residential high-density development and a concrete jungle with noise, countless trucks and trains coming and going? Are air quality, natural resources, critical bird habitat and wetlands nothing more than nuisances for developers to conquer?

Their bottom line is monetary gain. Rural culture is expendable. As I sit here on my deck, my heart aches for what will be lost, unless everyday Utahns rise to stop it.

So many times in my career have I heard this lament, from community after community next in line for expansion of the urbanized metro area.  And so often, I and my colleagues have tried to say to the officials in these communities, “growth is going to come, you can’t stop it or ignore it, so plan for it!  Put measures in place that will give you a community that will be bigger and denser than what you have now, but that you can live with, that you will like.”  And almost invariably, they don’t.  They make the same mistakes that other communities before them have, by not changing plans and codes to deal with the growth, and then they are just overwhelmed.  It’s kind of disheartening, after this many years of watching this scenario play out over and over again, to see it’s still happening… sigh!