This morning, the mayors of the county's cities and the County Council will debate which transportation projects should get the first bite of an estimated $50 million in annual revenues from a new quarter-cent sales tax, the result of overwhelming voter support of Proposition 3 on Nov. 7.

TRAX lines are not at the top of the list that ranks projects according to a set of criteria, though commuter rail to connect Salt Lake City with Utah County is second. The airport TRAX line is number 11, behind two major highways that UDOT is nowhere near ready to build and some state road projects that do little to relieve congestion. The Draper TRAX line ranks 26th, behind 21 road projects.

Some officials already have thrown down the gauntlet: Transit rules. And when project readiness is taken into account, it may be that TRAX lines are built long before road projects already on a separate Utah Department of Transportation schedule.

"If we do not find a mechanism to fund the airport [TRAX] line, it's a deal-breaker for me," said County Council member Joe Hatch.

Fellow Council member Jenny Wilson is backing Hatch's play. "It's time to do what the public wants and build more light-rail lines," said Wilson, who insists Mountain View Corridor highway funding should be scrapped in favor of TRAX.

This past summer, multiple polls showed the public backed using the sales tax for TRAX lines, which include routes to West Jordan-South Jordan and West Valley City.

Councilman Mark Crockett said the project list seems to be "significantly different" from what officials first pondered, then presented to the public.

"Most voters assumed they were voting on TRAX lines," not roads, said Crockett.

But the members of the Salt Lake County Council of Governments, made up of the county's mayors and other officials, don't necessarily love transit. If they pitch hard for roads, expect intracounty disputes for years to come on how to spend the same pot of money on transit and highways.

The complexity evolved over the summer, when the Salt Lake Chamber campaigned to have the Legislature allow Salt Lake County to substitute a sales-tax hike for a proposed property tax bond that would have been limited to building four TRAX lines.

The Chamber and its legislative allies argued the sales tax would raise more money than the property tax and could pay for some road work with the leftover funds. But along the way, state lawmakers imposed their own ideas of how the process should work.

The Legislature in special session passed a law allowing counties to invoke the quarter-cent hike. But it also set some conditions: The Legislature's Executive Appropriations Committee would have to approve the methods the county would use to rank projects; 25 percent of the revenues per year would go to buying Mountain View Corridor land, the rest of the money to be divided between Utah Transit Authority rail lines and UDOT road projects that already have received partial funding.

The decisions had to be based on relieving traffic congestion and cost-benefit analyses, plus some other less-important criteria.

If county officials decide today to accept the action taken last week by the Executive Appropriations Committee, whose members amended and then approved the ranking criteria, then the Legislature no longer has power over spending decisions.

At last, six weeks after passing Prop 3, county residents will know what their money will buy, sort of.

The projects won't actually be built in the order they are listed. Every project has challenges, said Sam Klemm, spokesman for the Wasatch Front Regional Council. He predicted the Council of Governments and County Council will rejigger the list.

UTA spokesman Justin Jones said work on all four TRAX lines and commuter rail could start in the coming year, but probably won't. Nothing can be planned until UTA officials know how much money they'll get from the county and what bankers will lend the agency. All Jones could promise was that the TRAX lines are scheduled to be completed by 2030, but could be done 15 years sooner.

Building transportation projects shouldn't be this difficult, Hatch said.

"The Legislature concocted this Rube Goldberg contraption. You run the marbles through it and nobody knows where they're going to come out in the end," he said. "It's very weird."