Well, this is rather unusual.  A bill popped out on Friday (that of itself is not normal this late in the session) that deals with land use.  The bill is SB328 – Municipal Service District Amendments, and deals very specifically with the Municipal Service District in Salt Lake County that was established several years ago to provide municipal-type services to unincorporated areas of SL County, to deal with the issue of general county tax revenue going to provide such services for unincorporated residents.

Since much of the unincorporated area of SL County and its townships have now been rolled into municipal-like situations, the district still provides services to those former townships by contract and agreement, including planning and land use services.  Reading the language of the bill, someone is obviously very unhappy with that specific service.  I’ve reached out to MSD to see what may be behind this, and it may have to do with specific improvement projects that by and large do not directly relate to land use administration, so if that’s the case the bill reflects little understanding of how such processes work.  For example, the bill only specifies one factor that is to be analyzed in land use proposals, and that is effect on property values.  Say what?  That is virtually never included in any list of impacts to be studied, primarily because it is wickedly hard to have a good idea of what may happen to surrounding property values, and because by its very nature any change in use has some kind of impact on property values, both negative and positive.  Court rulings have acknowledged this as well, and generally only come into play when all reasonable value of property is removed because of a land use action.

While it is most unlikely this bill will be going anywhere because there’s only a week left in the session, what worries me a little bit is that it may give someone ideas on something to try in future sessions, and we may have to deal with it some day.

Now I need to write an addendum to the last post about county growth planning and urban reserves.  A friend sent me this news story from KPCW, suggesting that the bill is the work of Ivory Development to try and get their way for their proposed Browns Canyon development in Summit County since they could not get approval for making it a preliminary municipality (only 2 a year are allowed, under the terms of the current code).

I opined in the post that I thought the proposed bill was not a bad idea, that it was along the lines of discussions we had been having in the annexation working group about how to make the annexation/incorporation process better to help manage future growth as it necessarily expands outside of current city boundaries.  Ivory representatives are part of the annexation working group.  The fact that this bill may have been prompted by a developer working on providing more housing in currently unincorporated areas does not necessarily make it a bad idea!  There’s value, in my opinion, that we try to do something like this to better deal with growth movin’ on out where it is inevitably going to need to go.  I think the bill could be tweaked to improve some things, but hey, maybe it at least starts this conversation!