The council met Thursday morning to tie up loose ends left Tuesday when a board of elected county officials agreed on the projects to be funded with the tax hike approved Nov. 7.
The brief meeting capped a six-week, uphill, post-election battle with state lawmakers that Councilman Joe Hatch has called "weird" and likened to a Rube Goldberg contraption.
The tax increase is expected to yield about $50 million per year. Twenty-five percent of that is earmarked for buying land for the west-side Mountain View Corridor highway. How to spend the rest was up to the County Council.
Thursday's vote locked in an estimated $37.5 million per year for four TRAX extensions, the FrontRunner commuter rail to connect Salt Lake City with Point of the Mountain and new asphalt and bridges on I-80 between State Street and 1300 East. Those projects were the council's top priorities from a list of 34 projects eligible for Proposition 3 funding.
Multiple polls conducted since last summer have shown county residents in favor of building the light-rail extensions. After Proposition 3 passed with 64 percent of the vote, the County Council and county mayors fought to keep those projects at the top of the list despite apparent legislative preference for road-building.
"I want to commend the public on their wisdom," said Council member Jenny Wilson.
Though the council was united in its final vote, some resentment toward the Legislature remains.
The council's September move to replace a property tax bond on the ballot with a sales tax increase was a good idea, said Councilmember Mark Crockett. But since then, he said, "we've been put in a flawed process."
Crockett said the County Council ought not to cede the Legislature control of county matters. "There's something we need to do so we aren't always running scared," he said.
The Legislature entered - or perhaps created - the fray last summer, when the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce lobbied for a special session to pass a bill allowing the sales tax increase. By the time the bill emerged in the September session, it had become a complex multi-step process that required the Executive Appropriations Committee's approval of arcane statistical analyses and engineering conclusions before the county could spend its own taxpayers' money.
The committee's repeated delays and postponements added to county officials' frustration. House Speaker Greg Curtis in particular was criticized for the difficulties that plagued implementation of Proposition 3.
But Thursday, Hatch, a former chief critic, praised Curtis for backing the sales tax.
