County Mayor Candidate Crompton Talks Open Space, Growth; Foe Workman Unimpressed

REPORTER: Standing on the windy slope of Ensign Peak, where Brigham Young is said to have first surveyed the Salt Lake Valley, Democrat Karen Crompton promised to make open space a priority if she is elected. She says she'll do that by creating a new task force to get the valley's cities, the county, and large private landowners working better together.

Crompton said she would also work for green space. As an example, she proposed a new way to preserve the Dimple Dell recreation area, a more than 600-acre strip of undeveloped land in the southeast section of the valley. Crompton says enacting a conservation easement is an efficient way of preserving some of the last remaining wild land in the county.

CROMPTON: "This is land the county already owns. We don't need to go out and identify a piece of land. We don't need to go out and identify a source of funding to purchase the land. This is a piece of land we can protect today."

Crompton's Republican opponent Nancy Workman says the land is already safe because of the rules that make it a recreation area. She says those federal regulations, which also helped the county buy the land, require development not take place.

WORKMAN: "It sounds wonderful, there's nothing wrong with it, except it's already proclaiming something that's there. It's like saying the asphalt on State Street should be black. Well, it is black, and yeah, asphalt should be black, that's good."

A recreation area, Crompton says, could allow development-- the county could build golf courses or baseball diamonds. She says an easement would mean means not touching the land at all.

As for broader development concerns, Workman says Crompton's task force will make little difference-- she says cities are already talking to cities and to the county about growth.

Analysts who deal with urban planning say the lines of communication are there, but often cities act alone, defending their independence sometimes without coordinating with other municipalities or the county.

CARR: "There are people at the county planning office you know who are like the crew of the Titanic."

Gene Carr is director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Utah.

CARR: "They feel it's going down. There's very little coordination. There's been more competition than coordination. there are municipalities out there whose street plans don't match each other, right at the border."

Envision Utah director Steve Holbrook says often this lack of coordination happens because of the way cities treat their long-term plans in the face of new development.

HOLBROOK: "The way they tend to plan, even though they have general plans, they don't always follow their general plans, and many times what drives the way we actually develop is a response to a specific proposal."

In other words, according to Holbrook, sometimes the cities don't even listen to themselves. But somewhat like that original planner, Brigham Young, both Crompton and Workman think in the new system of government, having a single voice to lead the county will help the cities listen to their plans and their neighbors.

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