That's not right.
Private property rights are a foundation of the federal and state constitutions. But the state constitution also reserves to the people the power to create laws through initiative petitions and to submit to the voters any law passed by their city council or county commission.
Senate Bill 53, enacted virtually without opposition by the session of the Legislature just concluded, and signed this week by Gov. Jon Huntsman, takes those initiative and referendum powers away where local land-use ordinances are concerned. Whether the courts will allow this legislative intrusion on the constitutional power of the people is an unanswered question that probably must await the appeal of a ripe lawsuit.
Sen. Brent Goodfellow, D-West Valley City, sponsor of SB53, claims that the new law merely places in statute the case law that the courts already have decided. He says that the courts have ruled that the people's initiative and referendum powers apply to the legislative actions of government but not to the executive. So, the people can create or challenge the laws their city councils have made, but they cannot challenge the decisions or the process the councils have used in administering those laws.
But that doesn't square with the decision of the Utah Supreme Court in 2005, which upheld the effort of citizen petitioners to place before the voters a referendum on the decision of the Sandy City Council to permit a former gravel pit to be redeveloped as Wal-Mart and Lowe's stores. In that case, the court held that "zoning actions properly taken by a city council operating under the council-mayor form of government are necessarily legislative and therefore subject to referenda."
SB53, by contrast, specifically exempts from referenda "implementation of a land use ordinance adopted by the local legislative body."
It should have been called the "Developer Protection Act." Once the city council has acted, the people have been cut out of the process.
