Giving birth to a new city wasn't supposed to be this difficult, but the 55,000 people in Taylorsville-Bennion whose voters approved the proposal last September to become the state's seventh largest city must feel they are being assailed on all sides.
Their pains are only the first signs of what I call municipal Darwinism - the natural-selection process by which Salt Lake County is going to fill with border-to-border cities.The new city, which won't officially open its doors until July, thought it had problems two weeks ago when Salt Lake County tried to grant $75,000 to help it organize and prepare for its first day. County Attorney Doug Short called the grant illegal, saying the county should get something in return. But that crisis ended peacefully after a week of wrangling when county officials agreed to put the mayor-elect and future city attorney on a county contract.
It was a solution worthy of a bureaucracy, kind of like telling us that eating only six doughnuts won't make us as fat as eating a half-dozen.
Now, however, the new city faces another, potentially more serious, threat. Several Kearns residents are upset because the new city's boundaries include key commercial properties they feel belong to them. These are people who hope one day to turn Kearns into a city. If the valley is a giant checkerboard, Tay-lors-ville-Bennion just jumped several of Kearns' pieces at once.
These folks are talking about suing to annul the September vote, the one in which 70.5 percent of the Taylorsville-Bennion voters who showed up said they wanted to become a city. And they appear to be hinging their hopes on a recent state Supreme Court decision that overturned the law governing incorporations.
That law, by the way, was impossible to read without getting a headache. It said, in effect, that counties had the power to decide whether areas could vote to incorporate, with the one exception that they didn't have the power to decide whether areas could incorporate.
No one should have been surprised when the Supreme Court ruled the law "inoperable" in a unanimous decision handed down Nov. 6.
The court was responding to a group in the Cottonwoods that wanted to hold an incorporation vote but was rejected by the county. But the court's decision left the Cottonwoods, Kearns, Magna and anyone else who wanted to become a city with little to do but stand around and wait for lawmakers to convene in January. For the moment, there is no law allowing for new cities to incorporate.
But that shouldn't nullify what the folks in Taylorsville-Bennion did. Not only did they vote before the court's decision, they showed an overwhelming desire to form a city. Officials with the new city say the area Kearns wants voted 90 percent in favor of incorporation.
Plebiscites should be sacrosanct. The Supreme Court struck down a part of the law governing disputes between the county and incorporation proponents, and there was no such dispute in Tay-lors-ville-Bennion.
Still, the people of Kearns have a valid concern. They are smart enough to see the eventual outcome of municipal Dar-winism.
As Salt Lake County grows, more and more areas will want to incorporate. Cities in the valley already have drawn battle lines, staking out their claims for where they want eventual borders to lie. The trouble is, few cities want to manifest certain neighborhoods in their destiny. Those neighborhoods are the ones without a commercial base nearby.
If Kearns loses the area in question - a neighborhood that includes Food 4 Less, Kmart, RC Willey and other businesses - it will lose the ability to generate about $800,000 in taxes each year. The simple rule of municipal economics is that businesses pad city budgets while homes are a drain. If Kearns and other areas around the county lose their commercial appeal, they will end up as far-flung pockets - orphan neighborhoods - that must be served by a cash-strapped county. That translates into higher taxes and diminished service.
Frankly, Kearns residents are raising their concerns a little late. But lawmakers ought to put incorporation law near the top of their agenda in January.
Otherwise, as state Rep. Sue Lockman, R-Kearns, said, some cities will have "streets paved with gold" while others "can't afford garbage service." Municipal Darwinism is not a sound planning principle for any county.