In 2025, more than 6,000 Summit County residents signed a petition to hold a referendum on a controversial development in Kimball Junction. Then it was known as Dakota Pacific, now Altus Park City.
At the same time petitioners were gathering signatures, the Utah Legislature passed a law that made the referendum moot.
According to former Park City Mayor and referendum supporter Dana Williams, the affair has spurred conversations around Utah about home rule.
“And there are dozens of states, Colorado passed theirs in 1906, that have home rule: that the state cannot come in and override local governments,” Williams told KPCW Monday.
The states with the strongest form of home rule include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Texas and Washington.
Legislators in those states still control broad issues like election administration. But Colorado’s system, for example, gives cities and counties that adopt home rule greater authority over local matters like taxes and zoning.
Shortly after the Utah Legislature greenlit Kimball Junction development, Summit County Councilmember Roger Armstrong called for home rule on KPCW’s “Local News Hour.”
“Local control has been chipped away at, and chipped away at, and chipped away at by the state Legislature,” Armstrong said in July 2025. “I think it's time that the state of Utah, counties and cities start to consider how we go about getting home rule encoded in the state Constitution.”
Others on the county council have said they'd welcome access to home rule.
That means building a two-thirds majority in the Legislature and then holding a statewide vote, which Williams said will take time and effort.
“There’s a couple of us that we thought we should rent an RV for a month and go to city councils and planning commissions all over the state,” Williams said.
The Park City area votes blue and identifies as less religious than the rest of deep-red Utah. But at a joint Summit and Wasatch County meeting in August, Armstrong expressed hope that a coalition can come together.
“I think after the data center dust-up and the political fallout from that, that it’s a message that likely translates well across county lines throughout all of Utah,” Armstrong said. “The message is: Do you want to be able to control … what your county looks like, addressing the problems that you've identified within your county as a community, or do you want a legislator from Riverton or Ogden or someplace else who may never have visited your county has no idea what you need to pass a one-size-fits-all legislative fix?”
Fans of home rule in Summit County, Utah, frequently make envious comparisons to Colorado.
Cities and counties there can decide on their own laws and government structure through a charter that functions like a miniature constitution.
Janna Young lived in Colorado before becoming Summit County’s deputy manager, and she was surprised Utah wasn’t a home rule state.
“It was pretty upsetting,” she said at the 2025 Wasatch Back Economic Summit. “I think sometimes we feel, as local public administrators, a little bit in crisis in our profession because you start to wonder, ‘What's the point of having local government?’”
The Leadership Park City program’s annual City Tour has raised awareness around home rule, especially as it relates to taxation. Summit County Manager Shayne Scott was one of the attendees who visited Breckenridge and Vail over the summer.
“It's funny, whenever we come back from Colorado, these are the conversations we often have, around home rule or other taxes that Colorado has that we don’t,” he said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” in June. “The way that they fund childcare, for example: They have a real estate tax on all real estate transactions that we don’t have the ability to implement here in Utah.”
Cities and counties in Utah can only do what state law enables them to do.
The Utah Supreme Court carved out an exception in 1980, so local governments do get more latitude to make rules in the interest of public welfare. Otherwise, state legislators rule the day.
Summit County is a financial supporter of KPCW.
