A developer wants to carve up the last open ground in the Jordanelle basin — not through Summit County’s normal planning process, but through SB258, a state law that lets a company petition to become its own “preliminary municipality,” largely writing its own rules on its own timeline, with weak review and no real infrastructure test.
I oppose it. And I know exactly what label is waiting for me when I show up to say so at a Summit County Council meeting: NIMBY. Not in My Back Yard. It’s a useful word for developers, because it lets them skip the argument and go straight to the insult. But it only works if “my backyard” means a few acres around your house. Out here, it doesn’t.
I am a capitalist. I believe in the free enterprise system. I believe in limited, more efficient government — not dictates handed down from Washington or the state capitol, but decisions made closest to the people who live with them. I spent much of a 42-year career in Washington and in the private sector trying to find the balance — the reasonable, rational guardrails that let markets work for the broader good instead of just the powerful few.
I defended fracking in Congress representing Oklahoma, and later nationally and internationally as CEO of the American Gas Association at the height of the shale revolution. I’m pro-nuclear. I am not, by instinct or record, anti-growth.
My son chose this place first — the Wasatch Back, Park City, the Jordanelle basin. We followed him for the same reasons anyone does: the mountains, the sky, the openness, the sense of room to breathe. That’s not a private amenity. It’s the whole reason this area has value, to the people who live here and to the state that taxes them. When developers manufacture a process to carve up the last open ground in that basin, they’re not building in someone’s backyard. They’re building in everyone’s.
That’s what happened with the HideOut annexation — a developer-dictated legislative sleight-of-hand that let the isolated town draw a gerrymandered route across the Wasatch and Summit county lines to annex open space in the Jordanelle basin, through a vote decided before it was ever held, slipped in under a state annexation law just before the legislature repealed it. My grandson and I made hand-painted protest signs for that fight in June 2021, standing over Richardson Flats — land still marked by legacy mine tailings, largely cleaned up over decades and now valued as open space and recreation, that a developer has now set its sights on commercializing. That fight is what pulled me into this one: the Lost Creek proposal at Browns Canyon.
That is not smart growth. It is growth that has learned to route around the people it will affect and the bodies — Planning Commission and County Council alike — meant to review it, ignoring the unanimous Commission rejection and the compelling countervailing public interest at stake.
I want to be precise about what I’m arguing, because it isn’t “no.” The Wasatch Back needs affordable, livable neighborhoods for the nurses, teachers, service workers and first responders who keep it running — and I’ve spent time this year with the people trying to build exactly that, in places with actual transit and infrastructure to support it. That is growth done right. Lost Creek is the wrong location — a greenfield site with none of that infrastructure — pursued through the wrong process. The problem was never growth. It’s growth that skips the guardrails.
I’d also ask our state legislators not to compound one mistake with another. The HideOut annexation was a developer-dictated legislative sleight-of-hand. SB258 is its equally bad successor — a different bill with the same flaw: it lets the developer write the rules it will be judged by. Fixing one broken process by handing the next developer an equally broken one isn’t reform. It’s just moving the loophole down the road.
What I’d ask of the Summit County Council, our state legislators, and the Governor and Lt. Governor’s offices is simple: balance. Balance the rights of landowners and investors against the rights of the community that has to live with the result. Balance today’s project against what the next generation inherits. And balance growth against sprawl — because if we approve enough projects like this, one at a time, we won’t wake up with a housing crisis solved. We’ll wake up with the sprawl we all moved here to escape. This is all our backyard. It’s worth defending.