Voters OK new Summit council form

Summit County residents voted Tuesday for a change of government and more open space.

A county government change from a three-member commission to five members and a county manager was barely approved by a margin of 50.5 percent.

The county's rapid growth in the past decade prompted the ballot proposition. The county manager will be a costly position not directly accountable to voters. The county manager would oversee the county's planning and zoning, public works and information-technology departments.

Park City residents overwhelmingly supported a $20 million open-space bond, by a margin of 82 percent. It's the third open-space bond that Park City residents have approved in the past eight years.

"The biggest thing is I'm absolutely thrilled," Park City Mayor Dana Williams said. "It's somewhat of an interesting community because we have no forest service or BLM land surrounding us. The only way to protect it is to flat out buy it."

The city of about 7,800 residents is considered a pioneer of open space in the state and was the first to approve an open-space bond in 1998. In 1998 and 2002, voters overwhelmingly approved raising their property taxes to fund $10 million in open-space preservation bonds. The bonds were approved by a margin of 75 percent and 80 percent, respectively.

Of those bond dollars, all but $1 million has either been spent or committed to land.

County residents also kept incumbent Bob Richer in County Commission seat A. After precinct results from the west side of the county were counted, the Snyderville Basin Democrat defeated Bill Miles, a Woodland Republican, by a margin of 58 percent.

Republican Commissioner Ken Woolstenhulme, who ran unopposed, retains his position in commission Seat B.

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