Summit County planning staff say an unnamed developer has applied to form a town in the Browns Canyon area.
Details are sparse. The lieutenant governor’s office had not posted the application online as of midday Jan. 14 and it’s unclear when it could be made available. Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson’s staff didn’t immediately respond to KPCW’s request for more information.
Summit County senior planner Ray Milliner mentioned the application at the Snyderville Basin Planning Commission Jan. 13, although the town would be within the eastern Summit County planning district.
“A developer has made an application for a township in Browns Canyon with the [lieutenant] governor's office,” he said. “We were notified of that about a week ago. That could be thousands of units. We're not sure what it'll be.”
The Browns Canyon area has seen incorporation attempts before.
Five years ago, a developer solicited resident interest in forming “Garff Ranch City” on 17,000 acres from Browns Canyon to Kamas. It never followed through with a formal incorporation application.
A few years before that, The Park Record reported that Promontory developer Francis Najafi applied to form a town on land owned by his LLC, South Point Utah. South Point pulled its application but still owns that land located between the rail trail and Browns Canyon Road near state Route 248.
The most recent efforts to form towns in Summit County have made it farther along in the process.
That includes Dakota Pacific Real Estate’s pending township in Kimball Junction, which it has framed as a backstop to ensure it can build its controversial mixed-use project there.
Landowners west of Kamas nearly got the would-be town of West Hills on the 2025 ballot, but other landowners blocked it in court.
Now the parties are waiting to argue the case for a second time at the Utah Supreme Court before justices make their final ruling.
Unlike West Hills, the Dakota Pacific town won’t need people within its border to vote to incorporate. That’s because it’s governed under a different part of Utah incorporation law.
It’s not yet clear which type of town the one in Browns Canyon would be.
The area is not densely populated. Nearly all of Browns Canyon is zoned for agriculture and one residential unit per 80 acres.
