Lea este artículo en español aquí.
All three towns in southern Summit County are taking action to shape their Main Street’s future this year.
Kamas is the most well established, commercially speaking. City Councilmember David Darcey said Kamas wants to use city center land more efficiently, rather than sprawl across open space.
He told colleagues at the most recent Eastern Summit County Planning Commission that Kamas will now allow “flagpole” or “panhandle” lots. Those are slender byways to connect Main Street to otherwise inaccessible lots behind existing storefronts or homes.
“Getting a lot of this stranded acreage that's behind all these big lots that we have in the older part of Kamas, to put density in there,” Darcey explained. “Instead of along state Route 32 in Marion, with another farmhouse.”
Oakley and Francis are far more residential than commercial, but that’s going to change.
Marion native Steve Smith bought much of the land in the center of Oakley around 2022 before applying to redevelop it. His application was on hold until the new mayor and city council took office this year.
On March 4, they met with the city planning commission to talk about next steps. Mayor Steve Wilmoth set the tone by saying he doesn’t want to “go backwards” this year.
“I'm super excited to actually put this together. I had a few naysayers that thought maybe this was going to be a little challenging, and I agreed,” he said. “I told everybody that this is one of the things that I wanted to do, and we were going to get it done.”
Whereas Oakley has a single landowner masterplanning the center of town, there are multiple developers at play in Francis.
Their projects have been just as hotly debated as Oakley’s city center, if not more. Residents have taken legal action to stop a hotel on Route 32, and another developer threatened a lawsuit before the city agreed to approve his hotel.
Francis also had a joint city council and planning commission meeting about the center of town on Feb. 26.
Like their neighbors to the north, they discussed how Francis’ vision fits into the “SR-32 Corridor and City Centers Master Plan.”
South Summit leaders drafted it in collaboration with the county government and Utah Department of Transportation in November 2025. Click here to read and download it.
One of the biggest problems it tries to tackle, according to Francis city planner Katie Henneuse, is how to have a vibrant, walkable downtown when Main Street is also a state highway.
“That’s really one of the main reasons that we were interested in being involved in the study, is because we were already grappling with that issue of having the [city] center at the intersection of these two state roads,” Henneuse said Feb. 26.
All the towns in South Summit are gateways to different parts of the Uinta Mountains, with a host of popular summer recreation spots.
The scenic Mirror Lake Highway begins in Kamas. Oakley accesses the Smith and Morehouse area, while Francis leads to Wolf Creek Pass.
The state Route 32 corridor plan is also intended to help the three municipalities think regionally as they plan their individual futures. There's more at sr32.org.
