The University of Utah's Center for Public Policy & Administration (CPPA) is creating a committee made up of stakeholders from both sides of the state line.
"We need a task force to get the people involved in this to move the process along," CPPA Director David Patton said Friday. "I don't want the [Wendovers] to depend on us entirely to do this. I like to have them take ownership of it."
Patton's group is doing annexation research and acting as a liaison with the Utah Legislature.
Utah's panelists probably will include officials from Wendover, Tooele County and the Tooele County School District. Nevada's will include officials from West Wendover, Elko County and the Elko County School District.
"We also would like congressional representation," Patton added. "I don't think we will have representatives and senators, but we would like people from those offices on the committee."
The task force is expected to meet later this month or in early February.
Annexation of Wendover, Utah, into West Wendover, Nev., has crawled at a snail's pace since residents of both towns passed a nonbinding resolution in November 2002 in favor of the move. However, some headway has been made recently, especially with the CPPA's involvement and a Nevada legislative subcommittee recommending approval of a merger.
Still, the issues separating Utah's cash-stricken Wendover and Nevada's casino-flush West Wendover are as substantive as the boundary that separates them. For instance, Tooele County wants roughly $486,000 to retire bond indebtedness on Wendover schools before releasing them to the Elko School District.
There also is the issue of Tooele County's Wendover airport, which commissioners will not sell cheap - between $2 million and $3.5 million, according to the latest estimates.
On the Nevada side, officials are leery about debt and would like federal dollars to defray the estimated $27 million annexation tab. Another issue is how to merge the cities' infrastructure and political leadership.
"Those are all issues we cannot take lightly," said Utah Senate President John Valentine, R-Orem and a task force backer. "Before we make a determination that we are going to do a consolidation of the two cities, we need to have a model of what it is going to look like after it's done."
For a merger to happen, legislatures in both states would need to sign off on an interstate compact. Then congressional leaders from the two states would have to back the move, something Nevada Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign have been loath to do.
While that is far down the road, Wendover City Manager Glenn Wadsworth says a task force could propel the process in that direction.
"Everybody's talking," Wadsworth said, "but someone has got to get off the dime and start accomplishing things if this annexation is going to happen."
