A quick note about of couple more bills that have come out.

S.B. 118 Water Efficiency Amendments – would establish a program to provide incentives for new developments to incorporate water-wise landscaping.  Not a bad idea.  Not sure how that would be justified if local ordinance would already require such landscaping in new development.

The second bill is, to me, a continuation of the long, long running annexation wars in Salt Lake County.  The bill, H.B. 330 Unincorporated Areas Amendments – applies only to Salt Lake County (site of much of the early days action in the annexation wars), and would automatically annex all unincorporated islands into the most populous adjacent city.  I can’t imagine this is going to go over well with some of the most vocal citizens of places like White City (much of it surrounded by Sandy City).  Here’s a description of the circus in the 1990s that a wrote a while back, that led to the mess of the state annexation code we now have.  It’s in the plan to get the rewrite of that code going in this legislative session.  This bill would just complicate that effort, I’m sure.

I’m getting more comments about how the wildlife planning bill – H.B. 195 Land Use Planning Amendments – would really make it problematic to amend local land use ordinances, because the way the bill is written, it would require any proposed change in the ordinance to conduct a wildlife assessment.  Wow!

Also, what with this bill, and the riparian areas planning bill – H.B. 243 Riparian Amendments – and other recent general plan requirements like the water planning element and the moderate income housing element, and maybe more coming, doing a general plan may become … undoable!  At least pretty long and expensive.

That’s it for now.