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Salt Lake County officials have settled on an approach for educating 150,000-plus residents of unincorporated areas about a pivotal election they face in just over six months.
The county will rely heavily on community council leaders throughout the six existing townships — and 44 pockets of unincorporated land — to get the word out to people about what's involved with the metropolitan township question on the ballot Nov. 3.
There's a lot of educating to do, county Mayor Ben McAdams' spokeswoman Alyson Heyrend acknowledged in a recent briefing for the County Council. If council members were to go out right now and ask people what the election was all about, she questioned, "how many do you think would even know what we're talking about?"
Very few, all agreed.
But there was less consensus about how best to get factual information out to the voters, especially given the limited time before the November vote.
In a nutshell, the election mandated by legislative approval of the county-promoted Community Preservation Act will give residents in each of the townships a choice: Do you want to form a metropolitan township or an independent city?
Those townships that opt for the metro township then will decide whether to join and run a municipal-services district being established by the county to provide snowplowing, streetlighting, animal services and other services traditionally delivered by cities — in much the same way the Unified Fire Authority and Unified Police Department were earlier carved out of the county's service portfolio.
A township that votes to become a city still could contract for services from the district or it could go it alone. Residents of the unincorporated islands, meanwhile, will decide whether to maintain the status quo or annex into an adjacent city.
The goal, ultimately, is to preserve the self-determination of individual communities while stabilizing unincorporated-area boundaries so the whole entity can pursue economic development.
The county will hold a public hearing June 3. And it is spending $269,000 to hire one consultant who will provide financial analysis for each township and island and another to set up town-hall meetings, hand out information and answer questions.
But to really spread the word door-to-door and inform as many people as possible, community council help is needed.
"We have a way of selling things to folks that the county doesn't," said Ron Faerber of Sandy Hills, a leader of Association of Community Councils Together (ACCT), an umbrella organization. "People don't realize what's coming their way. If the county just throws [information] out, it's not going to go over very well."
He and fellow ACCT leader Jana Helsten initially pitched an idea in which the county would allocate $50,000 to ACCT. They outlined a formula for distributing the money equitably among community councils and provided documentation to show how previous county appropriations were handled properly.
But council attorney Jason Rose, reinforced by District Attorney Sim Gill, said that approach had legal problems, especially with the county's commitment of neutrality.
If the county gave money to a community council, and then one of its members went out and pushed a particular viewpoint, Rose said that neutrality would be violated.
Heyrend, who heads an "external communications team" that includes community council representation, said her group is working diligently to put together factual information that avoids biased or controversial language.
She thought things would work best if her team developed all of the information, then gave it to community councils to distribute.
Faerber didn't care for that top-down approach. "We have such a short time to accomplish so much that if we throw a lot of bureaucracy into it, it will slow down. Can we streamline it to make it happen fast?" he asked, emphasizing that each community council has different issues of importance and needs to address those in their own ways.
Heyrend countered that the process of getting the word out would be slowed even more if community councils came up with pitches that were biased or had errors, were rejected by the external communications team and had to be redone. "That will be frustrating for everybody," she said.
Councilman Michael Jensen, a resident of unincorporated Magna, sided with Faerber and offered the solution unanimously adopted.
The council will set aside $50,000 for the ACCT education effort. Each time a community council develops an idea approved by the external communications team, an appropriate amount of money will be released to the group.
"I don't care if it takes more time," Jensen said, adding that for unincorporated-area residents, "it's their future. We get one chance to fix it — and only one."
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