* Wasatch Front Regional Council: Develops long-term transportation plans for Davis, Morgan, Salt Lake, Tooele and Weber counties.

* Mountainland Association of Governments: Long-range transportation planner for Utah, Wasatch and Summit counties.

* Envision Utah: Formed in 1997, the nonprofit group works to protect Utah's environment, economy and future quality of life. Who's who

l Wasatch Front Regional Council: Develops long-term transportation plans for Davis, Morgan, Salt Lake, Tooele and Weber counties.

l Mountainland Association of Govern- ments: Long-range transportation planner for Utah, Wasatch and Summit counties.

l Envision Utah: Formed in 1997, the nonprofit group works to protect Utah's environment, economy and future quality of life.

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Earlier this month, the Wasatch Front Regional Council and Mountainland Association of Governments signed a $500,000 agreement with Envision Utah to look at land use and growth in concert with long-range transportation planning.

It's a process called "visioning," and for most involved, signifies a shift in the way Mountainland and the Regional Council do business.

"What this process did was bring everyone in," said West Jordan mayor Bryan Holladay.

Known as Metropolitan Planning Organizations, the Regional Council and Mountainland are required by federal law to provide a transportation plan for Utah's urban areas.

The Utah Transit Authority and the Utah Department of Transportation are the agencies that make those plans reality.

What the contract with Envision Utah did is give cities and citizens more of a say in how roads are planned through their communities.

It is an agreement that also considers how and where communities are built, based on growth projections for the next 25 to 30 years.

Those are considerations that were never seriously looked at in the past by Utah's transportation planners.

"It's a broadening of our perspective," said Chuck Chappell, executive director of the Regional Council.

"The way transportation planning has been done historically - including plans that are in place now - was like a patchwork quilt," he added.

"It was a bunch of communities getting together and we somehow tried to merge all of those individual community views or perspectives into one common document, and we called that a regional plan."

While communities still retain the right under state law to change and adopt their own land use and plan their own infrastructure, Chappell hopes the new look at land use - and communication - will help Utah plan better for future growth.

The state no longer is made of distinct cities, Chappell said. Borders are merging, and communities, planners and builders need to work together.

"Our perspective now is looking at [planning] from a level of abstraction where we can blur the lines of communities and look at one common greater regional community," said Darrell Cook, executive director of Mountainland.

We want to be able to "see how a transportation network that functions at that level - intercounty and intercommunity - can network and address the needs of individuals within any particular community," Cook added.

And he is confident this new perspective will be successful. It worked well once in the past, but on a much smaller scale.

Last spring, UDOT began working with Envision Utah to develop a consensus plan, or "vision," for the Mountain View Corridor, a much-talked about freeway planned for Salt Lake City's west side.

It was a process that brought together a group of stakeholders - mayors, landowners, business leaders and conservationists - to talk over the course of a year about different needs.

What came out of it was a plan that most involved agreed to. And some cities discovered they could shift their land use toward something that would work better with freeway and transit.

An example is the Daybreak community in South Jordan.

While some may not be happy with the end result, Holladay said, at least communities and stakeholders had a say in the process.

"It's worked well for our city at this point," Holladay said. "As many concerns as I have about planning . . . it has had some real advantages to our city, to help us plan from the bottom up and make sure our plans are consistent with other cities."

And that's the goal, said Ted Knowlton, assistant director for Envision Utah.

"It's about multiple types of dialogue," he said. "It's about dialogue between elected officials in each city with the citizens in their city.

It's also a dialogue between "regional transportation decisions and local land-use decisions," Knowlton added.

And that has never really happened before.

nwarburton@sltrib.com