Residents of unincorporated Salt Lake County are paying an increased tax that the County Council did not authorize, and council members are not happy.

County Councilman Russell Skousen called a state Tax Commission-authorized 911 surcharge increase of about $1 year per telephone line "outrageous," and most of his fellows agreed with him.

Not the increase itself, necessarily, but the way it was instituted. The Valley Emergency Communications Center, of which the county is a member, petitioned the Tax Commission for the increase (approved by all the other local governments that are members of VECC) earlier this summer without the county's approval. It went into effect July 1.

Council members say they were left in the dark while all this was going on.

VECC officials approached the council for approval of the surcharge increase in mid-July, two weeks after the fact, but the council rejected it. The council considered the issue again last week, at which time council members discovered the process had gone on without them.

"The increase may be the absolute right thing to do, but they went about it all wrong," Councilman Joe Hatch said. "They came in for retroactive approval."

VECC officials say they have authority by contract to set the surcharge without county approval, but council members point to a state law prohibiting one government entity from binding another to a tax or fee increase.

The Legislature has allowed localities to increase their residents' 911 telephone surcharge to fund equipment and software upgrades that would enable dispatchers to automatically locate cell phone callers. Several Utah localities have already instituted the increase.

With VECC and the county at loggerheads right now, the future of the fee in Salt Lake County is up in the air. VECC collects the same fee in all its member localities, but the council has directed that its share be placed in an escrow account until the matter is settled.

In addition to Salt Lake County, members of VECC are Midvale, Murray, Sandy, South Jordan, South Salt Lake, West Jordan and West Valley City.

Hatch said the whole episode has left a bad taste in his mouth, particularly with regard to public works director David Stanley, Mayor Nancy Workman's representative on VECC's board. Hatch says Stanley should have told the council about VECC's decision to go ahead with the tax and the fact that the tax actually went into place July 1.

"He could come in now and say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and I would say, 'I want proof,' " Hatch said.

For his part, Stanley said the VECC meeting in which the decision was made was open to all ("this wasn't done subversively"), and that he was as surprised as the council to find that the increase had already gone into effect — he had believed it required both a VECC decision and the council's ratification of that decision to do so.

"I was shocked and surprised," he said.

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E-mail: aedwards@desnews.com