At a recent Jordanelle Special Service District board meeting, members of the Wasatch County Council approved the creation of a new district. The new district will be aid in snowmaking processes for Mayflower Mountain Resort.
The Jordanelle Special Service District or JSSD board meeting took place on January 14th at the county administration building in Heber. The special service district serves as a utility provider for culinary water and sewer in the Jordanelle area. One of the first things done at the meeting was the approval of a new interim general manager, Max Covey, who had been working as the JSSD assistant manager.
Covey says that the outgoing Jordanelle Special Service District Manager Ron Phillips was offered a position in another state, and although he enjoyed his time at the district, he was ready to move on and do some new things.
Covey explains the council approved the creation of the Mayflower Mountain District in order to give Extell a mechanism for funding the creation of snowmaking infrastructure in the new mountain resort.
“Jordanelle Special Service Districts is still the culinary water and the sewer provider in the area, with the snowmaking system being very much operated and maintained by the resort,” Covey explained. “That is something that we have never really wanted to be a part of. We do deliver snowmaking water to both Deer Crest and Deer Valley. How that is handled is we will pump it up to their property and then we hand it off to them and then they operate their snowmaking system as needed. So, this district was just to allow BLX and MIDA to have some different options to look at for the funding of that infrastructure.”
Covey adds that while the counties actions give the development another tool to fund their snowmaking process it doesn’t harm the county. Wasatch County will not loan or donate any funds to support the creation of the infrastructure, nor will the county’s credit be at risk.
At the meeting the board also approved the Mayflower Mountain development agreement. The development agreement outlines responsibilities and expectations that both parties agree to. One aspect includes how many Equivalent Residential Units will be expected in the development and how much water those units will require.
“It just outlines this is the amount of reserved water that this development has,” Covey continued. “Kind of outlines the ERU’s as well as the infrastructure. There will need to be new infrastructure built for this development. Some of that will be development level infrastructure, some will be system level. What that does is that just outlines how that will be paid for, who is responsible for paying for that, and different things like that. So, it's just a really broad overlook of the whole development and what their entitlements are as we have on record and moving forward just outlines what needs to be done. You know tanks would need to be built to provide proper storage for their culinary, as well as fire protection and different things like that.”
JSSD’s board also heard from Extell regarding an annexation petition.
"BLX has some property outside of the Jordanelle Special Service District boundary,” Covey said. “They would like to annex the property that they own within Wasatch County into the Jordanelle Special Service District. This petition would just change the special service district boundary to include all of the property they own within Wasatch County.”
The board approved to move forward with the petition request, which will require more steps to complete.
