Among those record-breaking 600 bills passed this year by the state Legislature, a curious piece imposing districts on the Summit County Council might qualify as the least consequential.
I say this mindful of the sound and fury around here in the wake of the legislation. The current all-Democrat council is furious. A few Republicans on the East Side sound hopeful, though without any reason that I can tell. Not like anything would change.
Indeed, the bill is an outrage in terms of sidestepping the will of the people who live and vote in Summit County. There was no clarion call among the citizenry for subdividing council representation into districts vs. at large. A little muttering among Republicans, maybe, about none of their partisan kind able to get elected in blue Summit County and the unfairness of it all, though Ari Ioannides got close last fall vs. Megan McKenna.
We’re the yin to Utah’s yang. Nothing new there.
Legislators who don’t represent Summit County carried the bill and dissembled to county leaders before doing one of those 11th hour sneaky things that drags down respect for Utah’s legislature unnecessarily.
The legislation is so lame our state representative, Mike Kohler, voted against it. Our state senator, Ronald Winterton, voted against it, too. Both of course are Republicans and among the few in a supermajority to vote no, just as a couple of Democrats voted for the legislation that passed handily.
The governor so far has neither signed nor vetoed this bill, which rests for now in appropriately murky purgatory.
About two-thirds of Utah’s counties are led by county commissioners elected at large. Only seven, including Summit and Wasatch counties, have more than three members on their boards. Comparatively speaking, we’re not underrepresented looking at, say, Utah County, with over 700,000 residents and three county commissioners — elected at large.
The math, at least, doesn’t show any compelling reason to toy with our structure. Summit County has five councilors and Wasatch seven — for counties each with about 40,000 residents. By this state’s standards, the councilors are practically tripping over one another.
Seems like the more thoughtful question for a meddling Legislature is whether the Wasatch Back needs a relative herd of county councilors, especially with the extra guidance on local affairs the state lawmakers are keen to offer.
Summit is my first county with an at-large board. Commissioners for the counties I covered on Colorado’s West Slope must live in their district but are elected at large. In Nevada County, California, where I got to live and work for half a dozen years, the supervisors are elected from their districts, so Truckee chooses their ski town rep and Penn Valley down in the oaks elects their ag land supervisor.
Somehow those counties all work just fine, at least as well as Summit and Wasatch. Who gets elected is what matters most, anyway. At least arguably, I’ve seen the stronger candidates generally prevail regardless of a county’s district structure.
You could argue that voters in a district might at least know their choices better than with at-large candidates, electing them out of their neighborhoods as they do.
In any case, flaming turds are unlikely to burn down the house that is Summit County if councilors come out of specific districts. Neither would there be any partisan advantage.
The districts would have to equalize by population, at around 6,000 people each, and each district would be dominated by greater Park City. Choose your poison, East Side. You get Park City at large or Park City in slices. But you get … Park City.
The current at-large configuration includes East Side native Tonja Hansen, by the way. Canice Harte is well connected that way, as is Chris Robinson. Roger Armstrong and Megan McKenna aren’t exactly anti-East Side themselves, although yes, everyone on the council at least nominally is a Democrat even if the work is decidedly nonpartisan and unsexy. They would be in districts, as well.
The effect of this rather frantic, kooky legislation is null. But setting up districts and elections based on those districts in the future would be annoying and waste taxpayer dollars to make something happen that the taxpayers never asked for. Although happen is a misnomer. So frankly, this is pretty stupid, too.
I don’t know that this is emblematic of the whole legislative session this year, in which those record 600 bills were passed in 45 days. There’s probably a pretty good argument in it for convening the Legislature like Nevada, Montana, North Dakota and Texas do. That is, taking every other year off.
Curiously, to me anyway, Senate President Stuart Adams and House Speaker Mike Schultz told reporters after the session that their jobs were to pass laws, being lawmakers and all. If so, they did a terrific job and helped add this bill to the running total with their own “yes” votes.
But I wonder whether that’s really such a hallmark of great legislative work. It seems to speak more to a need for adult supervision.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.