The Legislature’s annual session has mercifully come to an end. The governor still has a pile of bills to sign, but the damage assessment is underway.   Overall, it could have been worse. Most of their worst impulses didn’t make it into law.  The House’s immigration bill was so odiou s that they couldn’t find any senator who would touch it. They mucked around with election stuff, still having a hissy fit over their gerrymandering losses in court, and trying to complicate their referendum to undo the prior referendum.  There was a proposal that would have required Summit and Tooele counties to designate new areas for urban growth within their counties. Developers, having paved the last inch in Salt Lake County, want to sprawl out over newly designated urban zones in Summit and Tooele County.  The clear intent was to override local zoning and force the semi-rural counties to welcome growth spillover from Salt Lake County. Had it passed, Summit County would have to map where it would go (Hint: Ivory Homes’ land in Browns Canyon).  I would have recommended a different location for new suburban growth here in Summit County. There’s some privately owned land on the north slope of the Uintas.  It’s accessed by a mostly paved road from Lone Tree, Wyoming.  Since the Legislature didn’t say exactly where we had to accommodate Ivory Homes, that seems as good a place as any. It’s a scenic 75 mile commute to Rock Springs.That ultimately didn’t pass. The state is very concerned about the Great Salt Lake. The governor has a goal of restoring the lake to its relatively long-term average elevation by 2034. That way, the Olympics won’t be staged in clouds of polluted dust blowing off the dry lake bed.  They are so serious about it that they approved a $100 million revolving loan fund to subsidize water infrastructure to accelerate construction of single-family homes, with lawns.  As the state’s population has gone up, the lake level has gone down. More people using more water, and the lake dries up. Go figure. We’re in a persistent drought cycle that makes it worse, but adding more suburban lawns is not the solution to the lake’s decline.  It’s impossible to reconcile the state’s pro-growth agenda with saving the lake.  The population of Utah was 890,000 in 1960. The lake level was 4,196 feet above sea level, or about 3 feet above the current levels. The lake level has fluctuated a lot over time, rising to 4,210 in 1986 when they built the giant pumping plant to push water out into the west desert to prevent I-80 and the airport from being submerged.  The lakebed is so flat that a few feet in elevation spread out far and wide. In 1986, the record high, the lake covered 3,300 square miles of land. In 2022, the record low, it covered only 950 square miles. That leaves 2,350 square miles of dust behind. Despite the outliers, the lake level averaged around 4,200 feet from 1960 to 1996. The population had grown to just over 2 million people in 1996. Starting about then, the lake level has been trending downward, hitting a low of 4,188 in 2022 as the population now sits at 3.5 million. It’s projected to hit 5.6 million in 40 years, all of them trying to find parking at Canyons Village. The lake is toast. Somehow, faced with that existential threat, the Legislature made time this year to pass a bill that applies only to the new hotel in downtown Francis. The application was filed for a four-story hotel, within the town’s 45 foot height limit.  The town freaked out when a developer actually did what their own new ordinance said he could, and subsequently passed a new ordinance that said you can only have three stories within that 45 feet. The top floor was called “attic space” instead of hotel rooms. An attic with balconies and rough plumbing, but still an attic. They will be framing the third floor within a week.    So the approval was a mess, and given the statewide importance of building a 67-room hotel in Francis, the Legislature came to the rescue. They adopted a statute that applies to one permit, on one lot, in one small town.  Off hand, I would guess that there aren’t four  members of the state Legislature who ever heard of Francis, including legislators who are supposed to be representing it.  The bill’s sponsor was from South Jordan, where his constituents must have been deeply concerned about a hotel project in Francis.  I don’t really care about how many rooms the Ritz Francis hotel has. It’s a huge change in Francis. The project includes a lot of retail space in a town that has struggled to support a convenience store. It’s a huge risk, and will be a terrible mess if it fails. Now that it’s under construction, I hope it works.  Francis needs to beef up their codes to deal with the growth pressures that are about to hit like a haboob of Great Salt Lake dust.  But it’s just weird that the State Legislature would insert themselves into a zoning dispute over a 67-room hotel in a town of around 1,800 people. That’s why we have courts. Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986. The post More Dogs on Main: Legislative wrap-up appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less