Life in Eagle Mountain used to be peaceful and manageable. I remember a time when navigating the streets wasn't an ordeal, and living here was enjoyable and quiet. Unfortunately, those days are behind us.

Over the past several years, the city has grown to nearly 70,000 residents. Growth isn't the problem — growth is normal, even welcomed when managed well. The problem is that infrastructure, especially the road system, hasn't kept pace. Many of us sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic nearly every day just trying to get in or out of the city.

Meanwhile, the City Council has spent significant energy courting massive corporations — Meta, Tyson, Google, Walmart, and others — while road expansions and commuiny projects promised years ago sit stalled or forgotten. Meta alone secured tax incentives worth roughly $750 million over 20 years, in exchange for $100 million toward roads and utilities. That was a reasonable trade when the project was new. It isn't enough to justify what's being asked of residents now, as that footprint keeps expanding.

Eagle Mountain still doesn't have its own police department. The city contracts with the Utah County Sheriff's Office, and the Council recently proposed a 183% property tax increase specifically to fund seven additional deputies, because staffing hasn't kept pace with population growth. Residents are being asked to pay significantly more for basic public safety, while a multi-billion-dollar corporation that will contribute comparatively little over the long run pushes the city to build out even more power infrastructure for their own use.

That infrastructure push includes an active proposal to change zoning and annexation policy to allow small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), largely to power future data center growth. No site has been approved, but residents were given very little say before these conversations began. New power infrastructure for corporate data centers, or another housing development, shouldn't move forward before basic services are funded, promised community spaces are completed, and the roads are fixed for the people who already live here. 

Some of the roads residents rely on daily are still unpaved dirt, and when asked why, the city has pointed to private landowners or state land trusts as the reason paving hasn't happened. That may be true in a narrow legal sense, but these are roads the city's own residents use to get to work, school, and emergency services every day. If a road matters enough for thousands of people to drive on it daily, it should matter enough for the city to prioritize a real solution — whether that means negotiating access, funding an alternative route, or putting real pressure on the landowner — rather than treating it as someone else's problem indefinitely.

On top of this, city and business leaders keep citing Utah's housing shortage to justify rapid, dense development — yet many luxury single-family subdivisions and new apartment complexes built within the entire state, sit partially empty. Wages haven't kept up with housing costs that have jumped dramatically in just a few years. Building more expensive units doesn't solve a housing crisis if residents can't afford to live in them. That's not a reason to stop growth — it's a reason to demand that growth actually serve the people who live here.

Public safety officials have also raised a serious concern: with the current road network, how would this city evacuate efficiently in an emergency? As it stands, quickly moving nearly 70,000 people out of Eagle Mountain in an urgent situation is nearly impossible. This isn't just an inconvenience , it's a matter of public safety.

We are not anti-growth, and we are not anti-business. We're asking elected officials to stop putting corporate courtship and short-term revenue ahead of the people who already call this city home.

We're calling on the Eagle Mountain City Council to:

1. Complete stalled "private citizen" roads and community projects promised years ago (Walden Park Observatory, Downtown, etc.) before approving new large-scale developments.
2. Tie new development approvals to infrastructure capacity — no new subdivisions, data centers, or commercial projects without a funded, scheduled plan for the roads and emergency access they'll require.
3. Require large corporate beneficiaries like Meta to fund a larger share of the infrastructure and public safety costs their growth creates, rather than shifting those costs onto residents through property tax increases.
4. Require genuine, well-publicized public input — not just a legally-required hearing — before any zoning or annexation changes that could allow SMRs or other major industrial energy infrastructure inside city limits, and before further expanding power capacity for corporate data centers.
5. Publish data on housing occupancy and affordability, including vacancy rates in new developments, before approving additional luxury or high-density housing projects justified by "housing shortage" language.

Eagle Mountain can keep growing — but it should grow in a way that keeps residents safe, keeps housing genuinely attainable, and keeps elected leaders accountable to the people who live here, not just the corporations that want to move in.

Please sign and share this petition. Let's tell the Eagle Mountain City Council: residents first.