The Summit County Council voted unanimously to move the Snyderville Basin Cemetery District forward by appointing a board.
A five-person board of trustees to oversee the district is a necessary first step before work begins to find a cemetery location, so the county will begin fielding applications soon.
Currently, there is no cemetery in the Snyderville Basin, and basin residents cannot be buried in the Park City Cemetery, which itself has only four plots left.
To answer the need, in 2013 the council created a district in the basin that would contain a future cemetery. Then the issue got tabled for about a decade.
Now, there’s a renewed push from a committee of locals to provide their neighbors with a final resting place.
Independent land use planner and Snyderville Basin resident Christa Cassidy got involved with the cemetery project after a conversation she had with her dad Randy in 2020.
“It kind of became clear that that question about where he'd be laid to rest was really troubling him,” Cassidy said. “He's lived in the Snyderville Basin for almost 30 years, and burial is important to him, as is being buried in a place where he has a connection.”
Sally Cousins Elliott is a planner who has been a part of the committee spearheading the cemetery process from the beginning.
She thinks it’s going to happen this time around, and said members of the council seem amenable to the idea.
“Chris introduced Christa as somebody who was going to make this happen and see it through to the end,” Elliott said. “So I think this time we're a go.”
It’s a process that will take time and effort. Councilmember Tonja Hanson said the cemetery’s board of trustees will need to consider things like soil quality, land cost and the question of funding.
“So there's a lot more to it than just going out and going, ‘Oh, this looks good. Let's do it there,’” Hanson said.” So there will be some work that needs to be done.”
The council was also scheduled to discuss a new facility adjoining the Justice Center at Interstate 80 and U.S. Route 40: the Silver Summit County Services Building.
The county council heard some aspects of the design, like a high-tech county council meeting space, bigger meeting hall, dedicated space to store important records, childcare for county employees and public works facilities.
The new building would also house the Department of Motor Vehicles. All this would free up space at the Richins Building, which could be subsequently remodeled.
But the project is almost $10 million over budget. The county heard from High Valley Transit, which recently broke ground on its new facility nearby that the site has a layer of bedrock below it, which has increased construction estimates.
Deputy County Manager Janna Young said the rest of the deficit happened because some of the project’s aspects were not factored into the county’s budget last year.
“So it should have been only a $5 million difference this time around, which is still substantial,” Young said. “But we can explain again, through the site conditions and site work as well as inflation.”
Due to time constraints and technical difficulties at the meeting, the council tabled the budget discussion for a special session.
That special session will be Friday, March 3, at 3:30 p.m. in the South Summit County Services Building in Kamas. The council could decide to amend certain aspects of the design to resolve the budgeting problems. Click here to attend the meeting via Zoom.
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