A petition filed by the residents July 3 claims Summit County Clerk Eve Furse’s decision to invalidate the packets was “capricious” and not supported by state law.
They want her to count the signatures in the rejected packets and, if they meet the legal threshold, let voters decide if the Summit County Council was right in approving a controversial Kimball Junction development.
The petitioners include Angela Moschetta, Reed Galen, Ruby Diaz, Dana Williams and Brendan Weinstein; Diaz and Weinstein were among the seven initial sponsors to petition for a referendum.
During the initial petition process, Furse’s office rejected 30 of 77 total signature packets after seeing they were three-hole punched then subsequently spiral bound.
Furse said photos show some three-hole punched pages “being circulated without being in a bound packet” and invalidated every three-hole punched packet on the grounds they should be “bound as a unit throughout the petition process.”
The petition filed in 3rd District Court July 3 denies any pages in the rejected packets “were separated or circulated apart from” those packets. It states that they were submitted to the clerk as bound units and that Furse doesn’t have evidence to the contrary.
“Initially, the photos on which the county clerk based her decision only showed that the signature page was removed from a couple of referendum packets,” the new petition states. “And, even then, it showed that the signature pages were being presented with the referendum materials.”
The petitioners also say Utah law doesn’t discriminate between or mandate a particular type of binding and contend a prior Utah Supreme Court ruling backs that up.
Furse and Summit County spokesperson Derek Siddoway declined to comment July 3.
The case is on 3rd District Judge Richard Mrazik’s desk. No hearings have been set.
The development at the center of the controversy is Dakota Pacific Real Estate’s 725-unit neighborhood and public-private partnership with Summit County in Kimball Junction, near the Skullcandy headquarters.
The project has drawn public pushback, especially about adding people and traffic to a busy area of the county, over the past five years.
The seven referendum sponsors say they collected more than 6,000 signatures, enough to put it on the ballot this November. Furse’s office only verified 3,214 signatures and formally declared the petition “insufficient” June 23.
Separately, Dakota Pacific has asked for a new but largely similar agreement through the Summit County planning department under a 2025 state law written to greenlight the development.
County officials believe such an agreement would make the referendum on the old agreement irrelevant. But the new agreement could still be appealed to the county council and then to 3rd District Court if the county manager approves it.
Summit County is a financial supporter of KPCW. For a full list, click here.
