KEARNS — Votes have been cast, the nine members likely chosen, but residents here are still waiting to find out who of the 22 candidates they elected Tuesday to serve on the newly reorganized Kearns Community Council.

"It's just taking time, evidently," Jim Braden, spokesman for county Mayor Peter Corroon, said of the vote-counting process.

Sometime today is as close as officials would come to saying when results would be known. The count gap is likely a product of the council being strictly advisory and in an unincorporated part of the county, meaning the election fell outside normal election supervision by the county clerk's office. Nor is the election being run by the mayor's office, though Jacqueline Murphy, a member of the mayor's staff, is part of the effort.

A community council is a citizens group elected to act as liaisons between residents and the county's planning and zoning officials. Because Kearns is an unincorporated part of Salt Lake County, the community council is the only elected body concerned exclusively with representing residents there. Community councils do not write zoning ordinances or otherwise decide policy.

Murphy, who interacts with community councils on Corroon's behalf, said the results would not be released until they can be certified with the county clerk's office. The soonest that can be done is today, because the clerk's office closed before the votes were expected to be fully counted late Wednesday.

But county clerk Sherrie Swensen said results don't have to wait on her, noting that while the county has to receive a copy of the results, it doesn't have to certify the vote.

Overseeing the election is the Association of Community Councils Together, which county officials pointed out can basically set its own certification guidelines.

The confusion could be a natural side-effect of the controversy that set up the special election. The Kearns Town Council was dissolved in March after the county mayor's office, citing infighting and concerns about the way state and federal grants were being administered, announced it would no longer recognize the group. The grants became the subject of a district attorney investigation.

The county wanted the council to reorganize, adopt new bylaws, change its name to a community council, hold new elections and reapply for county recognition.

The old council, according to a letter from the county, had ceased to work productively, was filing financial statements with the county that were incomplete and inaccurate. Also, the name "town" council implied government authority that the citizens group didn't have, according to the county.

The Deseret Morning News will publish results as soon as they are released.

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