So here’s some intriguing stuff from one of the land use bills that is still moving forward in this legislative session – HB457 – County Growth Planning and Annexation Amendments.  This bill is in response to pleas from Weber County political leaders to allow for (or rather, force) automatic annexation of unincorporated islands into adjacent municipalities, much like what is happening in Salt Lake County through a bill from a past legislative session.  Weber County is a second class county, and so the bill was written to apply to such counties, but other second class counties were not so keen on the idea of automatic annexation.  So the bill was crafted in a way so that its provisions apply primarily just to Weber County (one stipulation is that the unincorporated island must be completely surrounded by one municipality – there are a number of those there, particularly in the community of North Ogden).

But to me, the really interesting part of the bill is a provision that requires counties to do some rather extensive planning for future growth and potential future annexations and incorporations, identifying such areas as “urban reserves” (see lines 510-575 of the bill). This echoes a lot of what was talked about in the annexation working group, namely the idea that there should be more planning for future urbanization of rural unincorporated county areas.  Hooray!  Some advance thinking and planning!  But the odd part of this to me is that this bill would only require such planning to be done by third class counties that are adjacent to a county of the first class (Salt Lake County).  That would mean only Summit and Tooele Counties would be affected.  Why just them?  It seems to me that all counties that border the major Wasatch Front counties would benefit from such an effort.  They’re all certainly going to be facing the same issues and pressures.  Hmmm.  Just sayin’.