Summit County may follow in the footsteps of Wasatch County and the town of Wallsburg in asking state lawmakers to repeal the preliminary municipality pilot program.
Created by a 2024 state law, it allows up to three landowners with mostly undeveloped property to create their own towns, called preliminary municipalities.
It’s a way to develop without going through conventional city or county planning processes.
Despite their concerns with the program, Summit County leaders are proceeding with caution ahead of the 2027 General Session.
The Summit County Council delayed a vote on a resolution calling for the program’s repeal Sept. 23.
“A resolution is just a piece of paper. Unlike the the name, it's not a resolution of the problem. It's just a statement,” Councilmember Chris Robinson said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” Sept. 24. “I think it would be better for us to engage with the state as opposed to just sending them mail.”
Robinson said a bill is in the works to repeal the preliminary municipality program during the legislative session, which begins in January.
Meanwhile, a developer seeking to build potentially thousands of homes in Summit County’s Browns Canyon has lobbied to expand the program.
Ivory Homes told lawmakers and others in an August email that preliminary municipalities are an important recourse for landowners “when counties fail to engage in good faith.”
The company cited a recent public hearing in which eastern Summit County planning commissioners voted against its plans for Browns Canyon. It had previously applied for a preliminary municipality there, but was too late.
“Ironically, one criticism of the planning commission and some in the public was that we had preemptively filed for a [preliminary municipality],” Ivory Development President Chris Gamvroulas wrote in the email. “But then the planning commission recommended denial of our application which means the only way forward for us is a preliminary municipality.”
Robinson said Sept. 23 that Summit County’s “objective is to change the policy or to change the attitude.”
“And this resolution may be a means to that, or it may be counterproductive to that, depending on how it's done,” he said.
His colleagues on the council agreed. Councilmember Roger Armstrong said their goal should be to persuade the Legislature to walk the program back.
“The practical matter of allowing a developer to come in and create impacts that we have no control over in terms of how it relates to water, infrastructure, utilities, transportation, everything else that can create problems and not solutions for the various parts of the county, I think is careless,” Armstrong said. “And I think it’s potentially even a little bit dangerous.”
State law only allows two preliminary municipality applications each year. Both for 2026 were in Wasatch County, although one has since been rejected because it didn’t meet all the law’s criteria.
The surviving application would incorporate the town of Wasatch Highlands east of Heber, with more than 700 homes on 2,700 acres.
Summit County is a financial supporter of KPCW.
