As many of you may know, the Utah state Legislators are in the current legislative session which ends tomorrow, March 4th. Several bills that have cleared their committees are being sent to the floor of the House and Senate for a vote in the next 2 days. These bills are HB 462SO1 and SB 140SO2. These bills are intended to force municipalities, like Summit County, to approve developments which meet certain requirements to provide affordable housing to the community in conjunction with transit hubs. This bill has been added at the last possible moment to avoid analysis and scrutiny from the communities that would be affected.  This bill takes away local control over developments that ONLY provide 10% affordable housing. The current thinking is that this bill has been sponsored by Dakota Pacific to bypass the county and the citizens of Summit County that opposed Dakota Pacific.  This is a sneaky and deplorable strategy from developers to take away decision making from local councils across all of Utah specially the communities that have one of 59 transit hubs. In our case, the state will force Summit County to approve the Dakota Pacific project which allow 1.7 million sq feet of residential housing, a hotel, and businesses, adding 3000 additional residents plus their vehicleswhich would be about 4000 more cars on state highway 224, the main corridor into our community. This is a dire situation since this bill is being pushed through the House and Senate and will become binding unless we get an exception made for Summit County. The way to do this is to demand that the language in the bill is changed from “Shall” to “May” which give counties more control over developments

I implore you to call the list below, today if possible, and tell our Representatives we want them to defeat this legislation orinclude a provision in the bill that exempts Summit County from having to approve the Dakota Pacific project or change the bill language from Shall” to “May”. PLEASE ACT NOW. This is our only possibility of stopping this underhanded developer trick to get their project approved.

Governor Cox: 801 538 1000, you can leave a message on this in his voice mail box

Stuart Adams:  President of the Senate   801 538 1035

Brad Wilson: Speaker of the House 801 538 1029

Mike Kohler:  801 420 6158  House Representative for District 54 which includes Summit County. Mike is voting against this bill and was on the Natural Resource committee that approved it 9 to 2. (Mike thinks this was the inappropriate committee for this bill.)

Steve Waldrip:  Author of the bill District 8   801 389 9329