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Doing everything required to hold a Nov. 3 election on the future of Salt Lake County's sprawling unincorporated areas will be no simple task.
"It's got me fretting about getting this all done in time," said Gavin Anderson, a normally unflappable county deputy district attorney, as he briefed the County Council recently about three main tasks that must be accomplished in the next six months to comply with the Community Preservation Act.
And that says nothing of educating the 150,000 or so unincorporated-area residents about what they are actually voting on: this new concoction known as a metropolitan township, with its equally new municipal-services district and a fledgling planning district governing three Wasatch Front canyons.
County Mayor Ben McAdams secured legislative approval last session for this three-pronged approach to resolving decades of boundary disputes, annexations and incorporations that have eaten away at the unincorporated area's geographic territory, population and tax base. His plan is designed to preserve and stabilize what's left while still allowing an individual community to become a city if it wants.
The county has set up an "external-communication team," headed by McAdams' spokeswoman Alyson Heyrend, to explain the concept to people through town-hall meetings, mailings and a website dedicated to the topic.
That may be the easy part.
A greater challenge confronts the surveyor's office and the district attorney's office in getting the county clerk the detailed information and maps she needs to put the proper language and descriptions on ballots.
Those materials must be available by mid-May, well in advance of a June 3 public hearing the county must hold as a precursor to the November vote.
"We do have a big burden of getting maps ready," Anderson said, noting that County Surveyor Reid Demman is "going through the history books to look at the descriptions of the [six existing] townships when they were created 20 years ago and seeing if the descriptions then are still on the books today."
Clearly there are differences, Demman said.
For starters, Millcreek Township currently extends from the Jordan River up to the east bench, then up Mill Creek Canyon to the county line. In the metropolitan township its eastern border would end at the canyon mouth with the upper territory going into the soon-to-be-established mountain planning district.
On the other end of the valley, Kennecott may request changes in the Magna and Copperton township boundaries — and has asked to remain excluded from the municipal-services district. The mining company has always wanted to stay in the unincorporated area because the county, unlike a city, cannot impose a utility tax. That tax would hit a big energy user like Kennecott hard. And November's election gives residents of Magna and Copperton (along with the other townships — Kearns, White City, Millcreek and Emigration Canyon) the right to form a city, which Kennecott would not prefer.
And then there are the unincorporated islands.
"At last count there were 44. Many of the islands have never really been described in terms of metes and bounds," Demman said, referring to a conventional method of describing the boundaries of land tracts.
"We have to describe each one separately and that becomes very challenging," he said, noting that some islands were shaped by four or five different annexations through the years.
Those parcels' boundaries will be tied down partly through reviews of voting-precinct and tax-district records, Demman said. But a key to accelerating the process will be a subcommittee meeting he will oversee Wednesday, involving community-council representatives who have been part of this process for more than a year, that will try to identify boundaries for the townships and islands more quickly.
"We have to create a [property] description that is easily understandable for the ballot. Too much information is too much," he said, noting that ballot language would be confined to describing an island by the streets that surround it.
But Demman's office also has to develop much more intricately detailed maps, too, "maps for a web environment so people can drill in and find the information they want. … We need to have the minutia. We have to know that information."
While the surveyor's office tracks down those details, Anderson and other deputy district attorneys will be drafting a half dozen ordinances to implement various aspects of the endeavor.
First, the county must complete the creation of the municipal-services district to provide basic public-works services — from snowplowing to street lighting to animal control — in the unincorporated areas.
That entails picking a starting date for the district, then arranging for the county to shift its municipal-services funding, employees and equipment over to the district.
Two ordinances must be drafted and approved to establish the mountain-planning district, which will be treated as a recreation-oriented zone of importance to residents countywide, not just those of the unincorporated area. Until now, the canyons — Little Cottonwood, Big Cottonwood and Mill Creek — have been governed as unincorporated areas.
Anderson has assigned two attorneys, Zach Shaw and Chris Preston, to prepare those ordinances, setting up a process for selecting a mountain-planning commission featuring representatives of valley cities as well as the county.
All of this frenetic activity will come with a price tag.
Associate Deputy Mayor Kimi Barnett, who is overseeing the whole process, will give the County Council an update Tuesday on $270,000 in projected costs for the surveyor, district attorney, clerk, township-services division, mayor's office and other county agencies involved in the extra election work.
The council also will consider a request from the Association of Community Councils Together (ACCT) for $50,000 to help them inform residents about what's happening.
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