Nine far northern Summit County households are getting “hammered” on their tax bills, as County Council Vice Chair Canice Harte put it June 11.
“After the meeting last night, one gentleman stayed and told me his property taxes are $27,000 to live in Upton, Utah, which is ludicrous,” Council Chair Tonja Hanson said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” June 12.
So the council is directing county staff to cut the allowance for a road maintenance district — called “Service Area 8” — by a third this budget season.
Councilmembers made the same recommendation in November, and Chief Financial Officer Matt Leavitt says they got costs down 25% annually from $850,000 to $634,000.
“As we evaluated, the situation was kind of a little late. We needed to kind of continue with maintenance programs and little bit of snow removal, things like that,” Leavitt said during the council’s June 11 discussion. “So we didn't quite get to a third.”
Service Area 8 maintains nearly all of Chalk Creek Road, which connects Coalville to the Wyoming border. But the way the taxing boundaries are drawn, only the properties closest to the border pay for the road.
Originally that meant oil drillers paid the most. But due to what Utah assessors call a “tax shift,” residential properties have become more responsible for paying for public goods. Just nine Chalk Creek households now have to bear roughly $50,000 extra in road costs.
Hanson and Councilmember Chris Robinson indicated there may be an appetite to dissolve the service area entirely, given the fact that many other county roads are funded by the entire tax base collectively.
“I want to get to the fundamental question of why we still need Service Area 8,” Robinson said. “It was set up during the heyday of the oil and gas boom in the 80s, when there was tons of volume. The North Slope and Anschutz East Ranch … whatever — those have all played out largely. Why do we need that? It's creating an inequity.”
Staff’s main concern with cutting the entire budget is that residents and businesses alike have come to expect a certain level of service and maintenance. Keeping that up will take money from other county initiatives.
Hanson, who lives on Chalk Creek Road in Coalville, wants to explore using a new oil and gas tax authorized by the Utah Legislature earlier this year.
Robinson doesn’t know how much it could offset the diminished Service Area 8 budget because the volume of oil drilling in Summit County is diminished too.
Hanson says that’s additional data the council needs to have before it makes a long-term decision about dissolving the service area.
So for now, they’re lowering the budget by another third. The time is ripe to do so, because the county is beginning to prepare its FY2026 budget, which must be passed by December.
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