And The Beat Goes On…

December 26, 2023 by Nicole Masson
Policy/Legislative

By Wilf Sommerkorn, The Utah Land Use Institute Blog

The signs that the upcoming legislative session will be all about planning and land use regulation continue, with the opinion piece published today by Gov. Cox.  Titled Our kids need paths to homeownership. Here’s how we can help, it is a reiteration of the announcements he made at the unveiling of his budget last week.  Much of the piece is about the budget proposals to help finance housing affordability measures, but towards the end, Gov. Cox calls out citizens and local officials to be more proactive:

We need you to work productively with your local elected officials to help them find solutions to our needed growth. … Please join with me in providing solutions for housing instead of creating roadblocks. Support your local elected leaders as they tackle the incredibly challenging problem of growing wisely. I need your help, and our children are depending on it.

This sounds like a plea for continuation of the more or less collaborative effort between state and local officials to attempt to address the housing affordability challenge, which I’ve noted in previous postings is a positive thing.  In states where such measures are mostly a top-down mandate, local governments tend to resist and implementation is spotty at best (this piece by Anthony Flint, writing for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, details the challenges of implementing state land use reforms at the local level).

As I just wrote in a recent post, there’s a lot going on in Utah on land use policy, but it’s not getting as much attention nationwide as some other states are, I think because what we’re doing isn’t nearly as contentious.  Salt Lake City has gotten some attention for its recently adopted land use reforms, but all the stuff going on at the state level (housing audit, UEOC policies, governor’s housing initiative)?  The best I’ve seen was this piece in Axios that notes,

• Salt Lake City opened a pop-up park earlier this year to draw people downtown — an experimental prelude to plans for an ambitious “Green Loop” surrounding downtown.
• “In Salt Lake City, they’ve grown their foot traffic 140% since the pandemic because they created more opportunity and ideas for people to come downtown,” (National League of Cities Executive Director Clarence) Anthony said.

Not a word about our statewide land use reform efforts.

Will we keep up the collaborative effort on land use reforms in our fair State?  We can only hope.  Recall, from an earlier post (October 16), the list of priorities that the UEOC was forwarding for legislative action.  Along with that was a list of non-consensus issues that were discussed, but were not ready for action.  The intent was to keep talking and not lose those issues.  Here again is the non-consensus list:

• Prohibiting parking minimum requirements
• Prohibiting or limiting residential structure setback requirements
• Making general plans “binding” – that is, requiring mandatory consistency of land use regulations with general plans
• Establishing minimum base densities for communities
• Allowing local governments to be liable for damages/financial penalties for non-compliance with adopted land use regulations
• Establishing a land use appeal authority at the regional or state level

I’ve been hearing rumors that a legislator has opened a bill file, on his/her own initiative, that would establish minimum base densities for cities throughout the state.  Talk about creating an uproar!  But more critically, I think such a move would seriously erode the sense of collaboration with local governments that has been in place (more or less) in land use legislation efforts up to this point.  We could wind up being like a lot of other states, with top-down mandates to cities and counties, who would drag their feet and push back and delay or stymie implementation, all because they didn’t feel a part of the process.

But we’d likely make national headlines!