No new bills of interest out yesterday. Thought I’d just quickly update what’s happening with some of the bills we are following, and to talk generally about what passage of these bills this year may mean for local government planners.
First, a big mea culpa on my part. On SB174, which includes the newly proposed subdivision process, I had said in my notice about it that this would apply to all cities and counties. Wrong! Our good friend and fellow legislature-watcher Mike Hyde at Duchesne County sent me a message yesterday saying, hey, that subdivision process change doesn’t apply to counties. Holy cow! He is absolutely right! I committed a real rookie mistake of not looking at the entire bill. When I saw that the other provisions on ADUs and MIH reports included changes in the county LUDMA as well as the city’s, I just assumed it also applied to the subdivision changes without actually looking. Guess what? It doesn’t.
Now the interesting question is, why not? Was this just an oversight? Was there no concern about how counties process subdivisions? (from anecdotes I’ve heard from the PRC, that’s not the case). Was it a great job of lobbying by the counties? Don’t know. It’ll just be odd if there’s this mandated subdivision approval process in LUDMA for cities, but not a corresponding one for counties. Now this may change, as there are on-going discussions and a promise of a new version of this process to come out in a substitute bill shortly, even though the bill was passed out favorably as is by Senate committee yesterday, so stay tuned on this.
Okay, on to some other bills. HB265 – Sentinel Landscape Amendments, the bill that would have prohibited cities from annexing land within 5,000 feet of a military facility, has been substituted. The substitute bill no long prohibits annexations, but instead requires cities with land within 5,000 feet of a military facility, and counties, to create a “compatible” land use plan for those areas by July 1, 2025. This is to be done in consultation of the state Department of Veteran and Military Affairs. This is set forth in a new LUDMA section titled “Land use compatible with military use.” The new section also stipulates that for land use applications that are received by a local government within 5,000 feet of the boundary of a military facility, the local government must first notify the DVMA and wait up to 90 days for a response for a determination of compatibility of the application. Wow! Around Camp Williams, Hill Air Force Base, and Tooele Army Depot, that could be a lot of land use applications!
Those are the big changes in bills we’re following.
Now just a quick note about all these bills and what they require. First, there are a lot of planning mandates put on local governments by bills this year and last – moderate income housing plans and reports, transit station area plans, a water element in the general plan (that is incredibly detailed and specific), an airport compatibility plan, a military facility compatibility plan. All these come with deadlines for adoption, and require time and money to complete. All this on top of the regular workload that the local planning staff already have to do, and for which they are often already shorthanded. Mike Hyde at Duchesne County just sent me a note today saying that he has talked with a consultant about what it would take to do the mandated airport plan for their county’s two small airports, and the answer is about $30,000 for each. For smaller jurisdictions, this can be significant.
The second thing is all the changes in land use provisions that are being enacted at the state level, this year and in several recent years, that require local governments to change their local codes and their practices. Again, many are just unable to keep up because there are so many and often so technical and detailed, and they’re already up to their eyeballs just handling day-to-day work. We would urge all involved in the legislative processes to keep these things in mind.