This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
It is true that any government organization that has held any kind of authority for a long time will be loathe to give it up. Laws can outlive their usefulness, and any power is subject to abuse.
But it should be hard to generate much sympathy for a few people owning some scattered properties in the canyons above Salt Lake City who claim that they are being put upon by the big, bad Department of Public Utilities.
In this feud, one where some of the aggrieved landowners are looking to state government for help, it is the city of Salt Lake City, Sandy and other valley communities that are clearly standing up in defense of the public interest.
As it is hard to imagine anything more basic to that public interest than a reliable source of clean water for half a million people.
A few folks who own properties or old mining interests in Little and Big Cottonwood canyons have complained for years that Salt Lake City is too quick to throw its weight around, limiting any kind of development that might affect the city's water supply. They tell stories of mean city bureaucrats squashing development plans or putting the screws to private citizens whose land they want to buy.
Recently, they've taken their complaints and their call for a limit to the city's jurisdiction over some 185 square miles of watershed to a state board called the Quality Growth Commission. That venue looks to have been chosen not so much because it is the correct jurisdictional path — it isn't — but because the commission's staff director, John Bennett, has helped some of the same landowners make their arguments in other forums.
If any government agency is overstepping its bounds in this matter, it is much more likely to be the QGC. That agency was created by the Legislature in 1999 to manage a fund for the preservation of farmland. But, thanks to the same Legislature, that fund has no money in it and, as conservatives generally fear about any bureaucracy once created, it has lumbered off in search of something else to do.
Lawmakers would be within their privilege to gather information and ideas about how any real or perceived unfairness to canyon landowners is unfairly depriving them of private property rights. How such wrongs might be righted by a more open process or by a willingness to pay more for land that is essential to watershed preservation.
But it would be much better for all concerned if the QGC would return to its original mission of conservation and leave the cities to do their job — a job they are right to guard jealously — of protecting the valley's water supply.