Good story in last weekend’s Trib about how in several counties, residents of newly developed unincorporated areas are trying to incorporate new cities/towns, mainly to get control of their land use planning processes.

Communities around Utah are opting to do away with living in unincorporated parts of their county — pushing instead to gain control of the decisions over development, growth and water usage that will shape them for years to come.

It’s interesting to note that the residents in these areas are trying to incorporate new communities, rather than annex into existing ones.  Some of those existing cities/towns have sometimes sought to annex at least some of those recent developments, but not without conflict.  Because our annexation and incorporation laws in the state code are such a mess, these issues have frequently found their way into the legislature’s hands, with resulting band-aid fixes and even backpedalling (see the whole Hideout/Summit County controversy).

One such conflict has been the new town of Erda and Tooele County, which resulted in some legislative back-and-forthing.

Jess Bird, the city council chair for the newly-minted Tooele County town of Erda, said residents were unhappy with decisions made by the county government over water and growth, which have set off a long road of legal fights and referendums.

Why not annex into Tooele City or Grantsville?

Another has been the effort in the Ogden Valley, just getting up steam, to incorporate.  Annexation into Huntsville doesn’t even seem to be a consideration.

Nick Dahlkamp is one of the handful of residents in eastern Weber County pushing to incorporate the new city in the Ogden Valley.

Dahlkamp, a former engineer and project manager, said the push to incorporate comes from the desire for some in the area to govern for themselves rather than have the county government make the decisions.

“The common theme I was hearing was … (people in the Ogden Valley) felt like even though they were presenting information to the county commissioners, their voices weren’t necessarily being heard,” Dahlkamp said.

I suspect that part of what is driving this desire to make their own new towns is that these residents don’t like the kind of development that county officials are approving (density! mixed-use! multi-family! not large-lot single-family!)

What this all emphasizes to me is the real lack of planning we are doing for new growth.  Much of the undeveloped land in our metro areas is in unincorporated counties.  These areas, of course, butt up right against the borders of our cities, where lots of growth is happening.  All that fresh land out there is mighty tempting, and sooner or later the owners will sell for the high land values and developers will start building.  Sometimes they annex, sometimes they don’t.  Is this any way to run a railroad?

I just recently had a discussion with a city manager of a good sized community off the Wasatch Front who had some questions about the annexation process, as his city was about to get an annexation petition, the first in many years.  Isn’t there growth occurring in your area, I asked.  Oh yes, quite a bit, was his response, but there’s been a long-standing aversion by property owners in the county to seek annexation to the “evil, grasping city.”  So virtually all new development for a number of years has been happening in the county, even with projects like multi-family housing right on the city boundary.  This all reminds me of the pattern of years ago in the Wasatch Front counties, and how that all ended in a huge mess.  Looks like the lessons haven’t been learned!

Late last year, the Land Use Task Force asked me to take charge of an effort to revamp the state’s annexation code.  We had a pretty good working group comprised of a number of city and county officials who worked on this.  One of the products of that working group was a memorandum on policy issues that should be considered in making changes to the annexation code.  One of those recommendations said,

The existing code indicates that “urban development” considered for approval by a county in the unincorporated area adjacent to an existing municipality cannot move forward until the county notifies the county, and then either receives a reply (whether positive or negative), or waits a specified period of time.  After that, the development review and approval may proceed in the county.  Given the issues surrounding the management of growth in Utah, the working group discussed briefly if this was the best policy.  Should the state instead revert to a policy that had existed in the annexation code in the past of not allowing development in unincorporated county areas within say a half mile of a city boundary, without the express agreement by the municipality.  Should we consider what occurs in some other states, such as extra-territorial land use authority by municipalities within a specified distance of their city boundaries?  Or perhaps something like urban growth boundaries around municipalities, as some states do?

In those discussions with the city manager mentioned earlier, we concluded that what really needs to happen is a joint effort between city and county officials to discuss how future growth should be handled, develop a plan, and stick to it!  Some counties, like Davis, have explicitly stated that urban growth belongs in cities and have changed their zoning and development process to direct things that way.  More should follow that lead, and at least decide how they’re going to handle new growth for the best long-term outcome.