This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2009, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
A decision to sideline Magna's longest-standing community council from hearing planning and zoning requests didn't make it through the summer.
Salt Lake County has backed away from an attempt to streamline its planning process in this west-side suburb, where developers long have complained about having to present their projects to two community councils -- one a democratically elected board, the other a privately run grass-roots coalition predating World War II.
Instead of recognizing the taxpayer-funded Magna Town Council as the only necessary stop for a builder before reaching the township's Planning Commission, the county again will urge developers also to take their projects before the older Magna Community Council.
"We didn't want it to seem like we were trying to eliminate [the Community Council's] opinion in any way," said Megan Hillyard, a community-relations specialist representing Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon
It's a flip-flop for the county, which announced last April that developers no longer would be asked to seek a recommendation from the Community Council -- a move officials hoped would simplify and speed up the township's planning process.
But the county met resistance from township activists such as Laura Jo McDermaid, who condemned the decision as disenfranchising Magna's oldest council and reversing more than two decades of planning precedent.
Since the councils splintered in 1987, the county has given both boards the chance to hear presentations and make recommendations on new developments.
Under recently scrapped policy, both councils were to receive planning documents and retain an equal voice before the township's Planning Commission, but builders had to attend only the Town Council meeting.
Now the county has abandoned that approach -- thankfully so, according to McDermaid.
"You just can't invalidate somebody's right," she said. "We are a bona fide community council."
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The Community Council emerged in the late 1920s as a volunteer coalition of business, industrial and civic leaders. With the financial backing of the then-Utah Copper Co. (now Kennecott), it replaced Main Street's wooden sidewalks with concrete ones, introduced the community's first street-numbering system and helped build Cyprus High's swimming pool and a senior center.
The community grew apart after World War II as tensions arose between Magna's older west side and its newer east side. That division reared its head in the mid-1980s, when the community considered where to build a county library: on historic Main or in the newer Arbor Park shopping center. The Community Council favored Main. (The library wound up at the shopping center, but a new one is now planned for Main.)
In 1987, Magna residents launched a successful campaign for an all-elected town board that they believed would better represent them. So the county formed a new democratic council now known as the Magna Town Council.
--- Jeremiah Stettler