The Dark Skies group has been fighting an uphill battle in recent weeks, between the court dismissing its original lawsuit Oct. 31 and the county council voting unanimously to approve the Heber Valley temple plans Nov. 8.
The temple project has been a flashpoint of the group’s opposition to the new lighting code adopted in April.
Despite these recent setbacks, the group remains dedicated to its mission: it filed an amended petition late Tuesday night.
In the updated petition, the group asserts it has new evidence to prove the courts should throw out the lighting ordinance.
Dark Skies spokesperson Lisa Bahash said the group is continuing to fight because the county’s behavior wasn’t right.
“Favorable treatment is not right,” she said. “So yesterday we filed an amended petition, and today we filed an application for a referendum on the temple ordinance.”
The petition argues the county broke state and federal law in several ways. It says officials violated public records and due process laws, prevented the group from exercising its right to participate in local government and engaged in viewpoint and religious discrimination.
The plaintiffs argue county staff have been “frequently evasive and uncooperative” in response to the Dark Skies group’s requests for information, “in stark contrast to the way the applicant [the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] was treated by county staff.”
This version of the petition goes into more depth about the county’s alleged violation of the Dark Skies group’s right to religious freedom. The last version said the county kept documents from the public based on its perception of their opinions about the temple plans, in what amounted to a religious test.
Now, the attorneys also argue Wasatch County favored the construction of a religious building while simultaneously withholding information and denying public services to members of Save Wasatch Back Dark Skies. They are asking the courts to declare their clients’ constitutional rights were violated.
“The county council, in the last 20 minutes of the Nov. 8 meeting, pretty much were giving testimony to the importance of a temple and their faith,” Bahash said. “This is all about religion, all about the desire to have a temple in that location as designed, as opposed to protecting the county’s zoning laws.”
The petition asks the judge to throw out the lighting ordinance and send it back to the planning commission to go through the public process all over again. It also wants the court to declare Wasatch County violated GRAMA, free speech laws, due process laws, and religious liberty laws.
Bahash said the group will press on for as long as they can.
“We’re going to continue to fight until we exhaust all of our legal possibilities,” she said.
She expects the county to file a motion to dismiss the new petition, just as it did with the last Dark Skies petition earlier this fall.
