Council & vacancy

by Kathy bence

Photo by Lori Cole

At this January 17 city council meeting it was announced that the city attorney, Heath Snow, has formally resigned after more than 16 years.

Public Forum

During the public comments, Lynda Williams requested that the city allow a flag initiative packet to be available at the city office to collect signatures. A statewide initiative has been filed and volunteers are gathering signatures to put the decision to a vote in November 2024. This would decide whether Utah’s flag from 1903 stays or is replaced. The Restore Utah's Flag initiative repeals Senate Bill 31 and restores the state flag as Utah’s only state flag. Once passed by the voters of Utah, the initiative further requires the state legislature to put any future changes to the state flag on a ballot. Lynda said that if you signed the Statewide Referendum during March and April 2023, you must sign the Statewide Initiative for your signature to count.

Nightly Rental

A nightly rental application submitted by Daisy Johnson was approved unanimously. There was a lot of discussion before the approval because there had been several residents who spoke in opposition to this rental at the planning commission meeting.

Although public comments are allowed during the planning commission meetings, the final decisions are made by the city council. Planning Commission Chair, Stacey Eaton, said he knew the council reviewed the video of that meeting so they understood the neighboring residents and their sentiment. However, the application met the criteria so the application had to be granted. He stressed that residents need to be aware of new ordinances that are being considered. The city currently has some in the pipeline. The time to publicly examine pending ordinances and offer suggestions or revisions should happen before they are passed into law.

Fiscal Year audit report

This was approved by all the council members except for Wayne Olsen. He abstained because he was new to the council and hadn’t viewed the report. I haven’t seen it linked on the city’s website.

Uniform Fee Schedule

This resolution modifying Toquerville’s consolidated uniform fee schedule removed the business license partial year fee of $25. Now the only option is a full-year license for $50.

General Plan Applicability

The council unanimously passed a restatement of the Toquerville City Code 10-7. It creates General Plan policies and a future land use map. It was mentioned during the discussion that there was a lot of citizen input on the city’s future land use map which is labeled “Zoning Map” on the city’s website. Whatever the land use map indicates, is what residents want according to the discussion. I hope so, but I have one concern. In both the current and restated code, it reads:

“The current general plan was adopted after careful study, significant public input, and several review hearings by both the planning commission and the city council.”

I would assume that “significant public input” refers to the general plan survey. The general plan should be driven by the survey results, otherwise why bother with a survey at all? If the residents want housing and commercial development then the city can change the zoning to accommodate that desire. If residents don’t want those changes, then why change zoning to accommodate things that our residents don’t want?

The survey results have been located!

The results are at the end of the pdf document of the General Plan 2023. A terrible, horrible survey (no bias here) was given to the residents more than a year ago. The survey itself was discussed in this post on development and these were the problems I saw back then:

Except for the write-in question at the end, the questions were redundant, leading, and complicated. People I spoke with said the survey didn’t allow them to express how they felt about development. 

There was never a price tag or an explanation of who would pay for all the improvements and amenities described on the survey. 

It was too long: 58 questions compared to 26 five years ago. 

For these same reasons, reading the results is not easy. Also for these reasons, I don’t think there were huge numbers that responded to the survey. But elections are decided by those who vote, not by how many vote. Looking at these survey results I don’t see a majority favoring tourism or commercial development.

That seems to be the opposite of what the city discusses in every meeting. The focus of meetings is about information and mandates from unelected boards, leagues, and districts outside our city. Do the survey results have any impact on the direction we move, or is it mainly developers and unelected governing bodies that determine our fate?

Of course, the State of Utah seems to be doing it’s best to make that the way city business is done so I’m not necessarily blaming our city leaders. However, I hope they stand up, when they can, to the unelected bureaucrats to protect the voice of the residents.

Toquerville City water ordinance

Speaking of districts, the city is working to come into compliance with the Washington County Water Conservancy District guidelines. This ordinance will affect new development and those who would like a rebate from the WCWCD for removing grass and going to water-wise landscape. The council tabled this landscape ordinance so the staff could fix some of the verbiage.

Michelle Peot has written detailed, well-documented posts detailing local water issues.

closed session

This was of interest from the closed session agenda:

“Discussion and possible action to approve a change order for the Toquerville Parkway Project in the amount of $600,000 to address the cut slopes.”