Bruce Van Dusen has been waiting nearly three years to find out whether he'll have the Heber Valley temple for a neighbor.
He and a few other Red Ledges residents sued Wasatch County over plans for the building, whose steeple will stretch 210 feet into the sky.
Standing outside the Utah Supreme Court Friday, Sept. 4, Van Dusen said it's been a lesson in patience to follow the lawsuit through.
“We’re just asking that the same rules apply to everyone, and we’re asking that zoning rules and general plans, which counties have put great thought into, are adhered to,” he said.
In fall 2023, Wasatch County cleared The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to construct the temple east of downtown Heber. The 4th District Court lawsuit followed close behind, and the church joined the lawsuit as a defendant in January 2024.
Attorneys from all three sides made their cases Friday to the Supreme Court, where the arguments largely turned on technical details of state land use law.
Red Ledges residents argue Wasatch County has misused its land use authority. They say they’ll be harmed if the temple goes forward due to added traffic, noise and light pollution and obstructed mountain views.
Their attorney, Robert Mansfield, said the county has the right to legislate, but not to disregard other portions of the state’s County Land Use, Development and Management Act, or CLUDMA.
“If you're giving a county carte blanche authority to go in and do any sort of land use regulation at once, without the possibility of any real review, then why even have CLUDMA?” he said.
But David Jordan, representing the church, said the law gives the county the right to do exactly what it did.
“They say, ‘Well, you changed the zoning code.’ No, there's no change to the zoning code,” he told justices. “They [county leaders] exercised their authority… to adopt a regulation which would otherwise be inconsistent or prohibited by the zoning code, the general plan, any of those things — and that's the beauty of the authority given to the county under CLUDMA.”
The county agrees and contends residents don’t meet the legal standards to bring a lawsuit over the temple approval.
Deputy county attorney Jon Woodard said the problems they may face are inherent to growth.
“We don’t believe that there’s an injury here,” he said. “We think that the problems that have been alleged are exaggerated, and they’re the sort of issues that we’d have in any development.”
Justices took the matter under advisement after about 90 minutes of arguments and questions.
It’s not immediately clear when the panel will issue a decision; there’s no deadline for them to do so.
The Supreme Court could uphold the district court’s ruling and side with Wasatch County. If it overturns the lower court’s opinion, Mansfield says the case will return to a 4th District judge for further action.
The temple will be 88,000 square feet, with a 210-foot steeple. The Supreme Court previously ruled that construction can continue during the lawsuit, and site work is underway.
