CITY NEWSLETTER

Each year, the Utah State Legislature meets for 45 days from mid-January to early March. During this time, the legislature will consider roughly 1,000 new bills, and vote to implement many of them into law. Hundreds of these bills will have direct impacts on cities, including impacts to homelessness, growth, taxes, law enforcement, and more.

The “legislative session” is in full swing, and our city is actively involved to give a voice to Midvale City residents. As mayor, I’m regularly at the capitol to voice support for, or opposition to, bills that will impact our community. While every year there are proposed bills that could have impacts on our city and our residents, this year there are already several legislative e orts where the impact could be signi cant.

As Midvale City is one of only three cities in Salt Lake County that hosts a year-round homeless shelter, and one of only ve cities across the state, homelessness is an issue that impacts our city more than many others. Before I go on, I want to be clear that I am truly proud that our community hosts the Midvale Family Resource Center, where many families experiencing homelessness are supported and given resources to get back on their feet. It is also true that hosting a shelter does come with its challenges.

Each year, the State of Utah gives shelter hosting cities money to minimize the impact on the areas directly surrounding the shelter. This money comes from a “mitigation fund” which all cities across the state, that don’t have a shelter pay into through sales tax. At most, cities will pay $200,000 into this fund, as it’s capped at this amount and based on the amount of sales tax collected – 6 cities across the state have hit that yearly cap. While last year Midvale City received $1.7 million to support mitigation e orts, our true mitigation costs were about $2.7 million. In short, at most, a city is paying $200,000 to not have a shelter, and we paid $1 million to have a shelter. Because of this, much of my time is spent with other mayors, trying to get them to understand the challenges we face as a shelter city, and convince them to step up and support providing more money into the mitigation fund or open a shelter themselves.

Luckily, we have made progress with many cities from all over the state and we believe our request for more mitigation is moving in the right direction. However, it’s not a guarantee, and in these 45 days, a lot could happen to change the current system of funding shelter mitigation.

As we all know, Midvale City has grown a lot in the last several years. As Utah is the fastest growing state in the entire country, we are not alone. While the current estimate for the statewide housing shortage stands at 31,000 units, that’s down from 56,000 units in 2017. Though cities are clearly making progress in trying to combat the a ordable housing crisis and appropriately growing to meet demand, state lawmakers are looking at continuing to force the hand of cities to grow more, and quickly.

By Mayor Marcus Stevenson

Whether it be requiring cities to plan for more high-density housing, shrinking lot sizes, or removing parts of the public process – many state lawmakers are working to ensure that cities continue to grow. As these conversations move forward during the legislative process, Midvale City will continue to advocate for local control and do our part to make sure that our legislators understand that Midvale has played, and is playing, its part to address the housing shortage. We strongly believe that the more these decisions are taken away from the local level, the worse position we will be in when balancing community wants and housing needs.

State lawmakers are proposing changes to many taxes, which have the chance of drastically impacting the ability to provide city services. There will be potential changes to property tax, sales tax, and the gas tax. More speci cally, these changes will reduce the amount of revenue that every city receives. While the State of Utah has generated a budget surplus, cities run a balanced budget, meaning we only collect what we need, and we spend those full amounts. If city revenues decrease as a result of new legislation, we will have a challenging time meeting the needs of our residents without increasing taxes. While many of these changes sound intriguing on the surface, they will create signi cant impacts that will a ect every person, municipality, and business in the state.

As recruiting and retaining police o cers has become increasingly challenging, the state has looked at ways to help. Mostly, the proposals center around retirement bene ts that are aimed to encourage individuals to enter the profession. Unfortunately, many of those costs are likely to be placed on local governments who fund law enforcement. While we know that these changes are likely needed, unfunded mandates are nancially daunting, especially when there are other proposals to cut municipal revenues.

Further, there is likely to be a proposed bill that would directly a ect Uni ed Police member communities – which includes Midvale City, along with Salt Lake County, Millcreek, Holladay, Magna, Kearns, and unincorporated areas of the county. With the Salt Lake County Sheri serving as the CEO of the Uni ed Police Department, the overlap in job duties between the Sheri ’s o ce and UPD has often created confusion and misunderstandings regarding how Uni ed Police operates. The proposed bill would mandate that the county sheri could no longer be the CEO of UPD and would likely result in removing Salt Lake County as a UPD member, which will impact the way our police department operates. Midvale City is opposed to this legislation and thinks that changes to UPD should be made by its member communities, not by the state legislature.

While many bills are being proposed that could impact our city, myself, our city council, and city sta , are actively advocating on behalf of our residents. During these 45 days, we are working tirelessly to ensure that Midvale gets the best deal possible and that we have a seat at the table.