Monday, March 24, will have been 21 days since the clerk’s office received the final batch of signatures seeking to overturn a controversial Kimball Junction development.
Summit County Clerk Eve Furse said her final verified signature count will be posted to the Utah Lt. Governor’s website at 9 a.m. Tuesday.
Seven Summit County residents have petitioned to put the county’s controversial development agreement with Dakota Pacific Real Estate on the ballot this November.
They’ve previously told KPCW they expect to meet the 4,554-signature threshold. With a few days to go, the clerk’s office has verified more than 3,200 signatures, over 70% of the requirement.
Click here to see how many signatures have been counted.
"We have the signature on the petition that we refer to. And then we go into our voter registration database, and we can compare the signature that's on the petition to the signatures in the file," Furse said. "We're also looking to see if somebody is a registered voter within our county, and so we look at the address."
The signature pages include voter's birthdays in case the address doesn't match.
Furse said state law allows each voter who signed the petition 45 days to remove their signature after it appears on the Lt. Governor’s website.
After that, her office is allotted more time to calculate whether residents got enough signatures across different areas of the county to put the council’s deal with Dakota Pacific on the ballot.
Furse said the final deadline to rule one way or another is June 23.
The sponsors told KPCW they submitted almost double the number of signatures the clerk’s office says it’s verified so far.
When the group submitted the first 25 signature packets, Furse said 21 were invalid in part because of how they were bound.
That could’ve invalidated up to 2,100 signatures. However, the sponsors say every packet they turned in was compliant with state code and said they would challenge Furse’s finding in court, if needed.
During the effort, Dakota Pacific formed a political issues committee, Wasatch Back Future, to hire door-to-door canvassers and others to advocate against signing the referendum petition.
The signature-gathering effort, dubbed Protect Summit County, was staffed by volunteers.
The development at the center of the dispute is a proposed 725-unit neighborhood, nearly half reserved for the local workforce. It included a public-private partnership to build a new Kimball Junction Transit Center, park-and-ride, pedestrian bridge, more affordable housing and a plaza where the library sits now.
Dakota Pacific would pitch in $3.75 million to parts of the partnership, with Summit County, High Valley Transit and the Utah Department of Transportation sharing the rest of the cost.
Separate from the referendum, two other processes are underway that could let Dakota Pacific break ground anyway.
One is incorporation: the company filed to form a town out of its 50 acres surrounding SkullCandy headquarters, giving a self-appointed board the land use authority, circumventing the county.
Dakota Pacific might not be able to build for at least a year if it goes the incorporation route. The Lt. Governor’s Office says the next step is engaging consultants to see if the town could raise enough taxes to provide services.
The second option is using Senate Bill 26. Bill sponsor Sen. Wayne Harper, R-Taylorsville, said it codifies the agreement the county and developer made in December.
Under SB26, which took effect March 12, Dakota Pacific only needs administrative approvals from the Summit County Planning Department to build.
If the company is successful in either pursuit, it could circumvent the referendum.
