"I would venture to say that if they can be open by summer, that would be incredibly quick," Duerksen said. "They would have to be working seven days a week for that to happen and then hope that the winter is helpful to them."

The City Council first passed the zone change Nov. 23, 2004. Within a month, Save Our Communities had organized a petition drive for signatures to place the zone change on the ballot. The Sandy City recorder initially rejected the group's signatures for having too few signatures. SOC sued the city, asking state courts to lower the threshold. After winding through appeals courts, the Utah Supreme Court ruled July 1 that Sandy must hold the referendum.

The high court also re-wrote the referendum wording after SOC complained it was too wordy and obtuse to decipher. The court's wording, which appeared on ballots Tuesday, asked voters to vote for or against the zone change that allowed several uses prohibited under the old zone.

With the "for" side win, the Boyer Co. will move forward with the 107-acre development, which has several phases expected to be built over the next several years, Williams said.

The SOC activists who campaigned for one year to block the development will adjust, eventually, or find another cause — taking with them the knowledge they gained during the campaign, Bagley said.

"First of all, we will be friends forever, and secondly, we'll be keeping an eye on Sandy," Bagley said. "We respect what the citizens have decided. We gave them the option to choose — certainly we would have liked to prevail, but that's not what happened and we respect that."

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E-MAIL: kswinyard@desnews.com