Last week’s proposal to secede from Utah and annex to Wyoming was well received, especially among a large number of people who live in Pinebrook but, for some reason, register their cars in Evanston. How all those pilots live in the same little trailer is anybody’s guess. But they thought the idea of formally annexing to Wyoming, and the Cowboy state’s absence of state income tax, was a great idea.
Others thought it might be better for our ski industry to annex to Colorado. We could get there, but to be contiguous, we would have to take Daggett County with us. There are more employees at the Montage hotel than there are residents in Daggett County, so it couldn’t be all that hard to convince them to join in the movement. Colorado has a state income tax, which lessens the appeal. On the other hand, their governor is named Hickenlooper, which is so fun to say that it’s almost worth making the change just to create reasons to say “Hickenlooper.” There’s certainly nothing entertaining about Gov. Gary Herbert.
We could also create contiguity with Idaho by dragging Rich County into the secession movement. Rich County has more people than Daggett, but not enough to fill the Eccles Center. I don’t know if they would come along or not. Idaho also has a state income tax, and frankly, the politics in Idaho are no less weird than Utah’s. So I think we should focus on becoming part of Wyoming.
A friend from New Zealand thought that becoming part of the Kiwi nation was a reasonable option. She thought that might improve her chances of getting an invite to the royal wedding this spring. Having to go all the way to Christchurch to register your car would be a serious inconvenience. On the other hand, the New Zealand national health program is a lot less expensive and provides better coverage than I currently get from those blood-suckers at Blue Cross. But it seems complicated.
Still, the ease and logic of connecting to Wyoming sort of outweighs all the other ideas. So how does that happen?
Well, it came close to happening a few years back in Wendover. Wendover, Utah, is a poor community with no tax base to speak of, and lots of children whose parents work in the casinos and hotels located across the street in West Wendover, Nevada. The Nevada version of Wendover has a huge tax base but very few residents. In many ways, the two towns function as one. Except that half of it was in Mountain Time Zone and the other half Pacific. Congress changed the time-zone boundary in 1999 so all of it is in the Mountain Time Zone. But when it comes to funding government services, the imbalance between population and tax base on either side of the state line caused some problems, especially when it came to building new schools.
So in 2002, they got the idea to change the state line to put all of Wendover into Nevada. Making the change required an act of Congress and the consent of both state legislatures. Utah Representative Jim Hansen (best known locally for unilaterally canceling the City’s lease on the Red Maple mining claims, giving birth to the whole MIDA fiasco) sponsored a bill to move the boundary. It would have been just as easy to include West Wendover in Utah except for that part about the gambling, drinking, and sinning. So Hansen was willing to reject the sinners in Wendover and let them join Nevada in outer darkness. Referenda in both towns approved it.
Things moved along quite nicely, right up until the happy couple of towns approached the Elvis impersonator at the altar. Then Nevada realized that Utah’s Wendover came into the marriage with $27 million in debt it couldn’t pay off. Negotiation of the prenup blew it all apart, and the boundary stayed put.
But the process is pretty clear, and the precedent is in place. So what we need is a sponsor in Congress to introduce the federal legislation to shift the Utah-Wyoming boundary so that Summit County is added to Wyoming. I’m not sure anybody in the Utah delegation would touch it (though if the Tea Party blessed it, Orrin Hatch would be all over it). We probably need to find somebody far removed from the situation. When it comes to matters of secession, maybe we should go to right to the source and work with the South Carolina delegation. Jim DeMint may be our guy.
“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another “
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland, and has been writing this column for nearly 25 years.