Summit County • From the back porch of Jen McCaffrey’s cabin, tucked into an aspen grove high above the Kamas Valley, the town of Oakley can be seen to the north. At the south end of her property, the snow-dusted Mt. Timpanogos peeks over the distant ridgeline
A cow and her calf munch on the green late-spring foliage with a wary eye before ambling back into the trees.
McCaffrey bought her 80-acre parcel back in 2000. It is off the grid, powered by solar power and a generator. In the summer, it’s accessible by a bumpy drive up the rocky dirt road and in the winter months, it’s only accessible by snowmobile or a cross-country ski trip up the steep hill.
Her home is so remote that she was shocked when she found out it could soon become part of Summit County’s newest township of West Hills. And because McCaffrey only lives in the home part of the year, she won’t have a say on whether or not she becomes a resident of the new burg.
She only found out her land was within the proposed boundaries last summer when she was contacted by a local reporter.
“When I got this call, I thought, ‘Uh oh. How could I possibly be in this map?’” McCaffrey said. “I saw it and there I am at the very top of it and I thought, ‘OK, this is not OK.’” McCaffery said no one asked her about being included in the proposed township and that she feels like her constitutional rights are being infringed.
The proposed incorporation — which will be decided by 47 voters in the upcoming November election — has divided neighbors; spawned one lawsuit by residents, like McCaffrey, opposed to the township; and led to a threat of a lawsuit against officials from Summit County and Kamas who are being accused of illegally speaking in opposition to the West Hills plans.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) A subdivision in Summit County that would be split by the incorporation of the town of West Hills, on Friday, May 30, 2025.
Derek Anderson, an attorney who is the sponsor of the township plan, says he is unfairly being cast as the voracious developer and that there are benefits that would come from creation of the town — more flexibility and local control over land use decisions, chief among them.
“For several years, we’ve tried to get modest land use concessions from Summit County, and even tried to annex into Kamas, and were always met with fierce resistance,” he said. “The current zoning is for one unit per 40 or 80 acres. The only avenue around the county’s stubbornness was incorporation via an election. … In November, residents can decide if they’d like flexibility via town incorporation or keep the status quo.”
The Garff Ranches
Most of the land slated for incorporation used to be the Garff Ranches, a sprawling grazing ground that is now sandwiched between the towns of Hideout, Francis and Kamas. In the early 1990s, the ranch was partitioned into 40-acre lots, and while people could build a home, cattle could still roam and graze until they were moved up into the Uintas for summer.
That is how it has remained. Cattle laze about on the roadsides and shamble up dirt paths. The roads are all privately owned and maintained, including plowing in the winter. Most of the water comes from wells, homes use septic tanks and residents drive their trash down to the centralized bins.
There is an elk herd that travels through the rolling hills and deer are plentiful. There are wild turkeys and marmots, and there are reports of a mountain lion sighting. Lindy Sternlight says there is a badger that burrows on her property. She has named him Sparky.
Sternlight and her husband, Dan, bought a 40-acre parcel in 2019, and said they knew when they bought the property that there were restrictions on development on the property. Now they’re concerned that their agrarian lifestyle could change dramatically.
“We don’t know what it’s going to be. Quarter acres? It could be condos,” she said. “There’s those buzzwords of stewardship and sustainability, but we’re doing it … and when this valley looks up, they still get to see that fragment of history and fragment of open space.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Lindy Sternlight in Summit County where residents are suing to stop the incorporation of the town of West Hills, on Tuesday, May 27, 2025.
The initial iteration of West Hills was drawn up and submitted to the lieutenant governor — whose office oversees the incorporation process — in 2023. At that point, it was a reasonably contiguous block of parcels straddling State Route 248.
After public hearings on the proposal, though, some residents — about 50, according to Anderson — opted to exclude themselves from the boundaries. The map was redrawn, but the new town limits came up three residents short of the 100 people needed under state law in order to form a town.
After the third iteration, the lieutenant governor’s office deemed it met the criteria to incorporate. The map at that point included long peninsulas. Homes on one side of the road would be in the town, while those nearby would not. There are islands of unincorporated property almost entirely surrounded by what could eventually become West Hills.
Summit County’s development director critiqued the plan, saying it lacked an obvious town center and included “somewhat arthritic fingers” of property that would make it more difficult to provide services.
Along Democrat Alley, a road that turns off of SR248, the map looks like a comb with teeth that have been snapped off, where individual lots have been omitted. About 720 acres within the proposed municipal boundaries are owned by Property Reserve Inc., the land-holding arm for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Records show it is valued at just under $3.6 million.
Anderson said that the map “looks so discombobulated” because they honored residents’ desire to be excluded from the proposed township.
“After being removed, some of these individuals now argue that they don’t have a voice, despite being heard at the two public meetings and through their exclusion requests,” he said. “Ironically, they now claim that I gerrymandered the proposed boundaries, when they essentially gerrymandered themselves off the map.”
The lawsuit filed by West Hills opponents makes two claims. First, it says the boundaries were drawn to include owners of second homes, like McCaffrey, who would not be able to vote. Second, it says the boundaries were drawn to remove people who would be likely to vote against incorporation, leaving them impacted by the change but with no voice in the outcome.
Anderson contends the township will return control over land-use decisions to the residents. On his lot, for example, he says the county only allows one home on the 32-acre parcel, but his neighbors have built homes on lots ranging between an acre and five acres. It is, he contends, a “not-in-my-backyard” mentality.
“This reflects a ‘NIMBY’ mindset in the area, where those who’ve secured their interests block others, resulting in an unequal system of landowners. This is why incorporation would benefit owners like me, who, for various reasons, seek more equitable land use options similar to those of our neighbors.”
Incorporation Consternation
This map shows the boundaries (in red) for the proposed town of West Hills. The incorporation has been signed off on by the state. Now 47 voters will decide in November whether to create the new municipality.
West Hills is the latest example of the oftentimes contentious incorporation process. On average, there are typically one to two incorporations taking place every year, and the Legislature frequently makes tweaks to the law based on issues that arose in the creation of the prior town and sometimes what organizers want in the next one.
“We have historic pioneer communities in Utah that have only recently incorporated into formal municipalities,” said Cameron Diehl, executive director of the Utah League of Cities and Towns. “There comes a time for many communities where they are grappling with questions around governance, tax policy, planning and infrastructure and if they get to that point where they feel like they would be in a better position to meet those needs by formally creating their own town or government.”
In some cases, incorporation can get messy. In 2020, voters in Erda opted to incorporate, but the town still doesn’t have formalized municipal boundaries because it has been tied up in litigation over how much development to allow. And in 2024, there were competing bills in the Legislature impacting the proposed incorporation of Ogden Valley — one aimed at making it easier to incorporate, another making it harder. Residents voted to create the new municipality last fall.
On top of that, lawmakers have created a new process — preliminary municipalities, most notably Kane Creek outside of Moab, but also Willow in Kane County — where smaller groups of developers can form a quasi-city that has more land-use independence from the counties, but it doesn’t require a vote of residents and doesn’t have taxing authority.
West Hills is just one of 11 would-be cities, towns and preliminary municipalities with applications pending.
According to a legally required feasibility study prepared for the lieutenant governor’s office, the population of the new town is projected to grow fivefold, from 103 residents to 574 residents, in four years, with 200 new homes being built within the town boundaries.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) DeEtte Earl points the fence in her backyard, where the boundaries of the proposed town West Hills would begin, on Tuesday, May 27, 2025.
Mathematically, that would require subdividing many of the lots in the town boundaries.
“Some will keep their property as-is,” said Anderson, “while others may prefer five- to 10-acre lots, and still others will explore different options.”
He said that ultimately it will offer local control and “empower communities to shape their future” without being under the constraints imposed by the county.
According to the feasibility study, the plan for West Hills envisions a projected 78,000 square feet of commercial development and 20,000 square feet of industrial buildings in that span.
It’s that kind of rapid growth that worries DeEtte Earl. The middle school teacher and her husband, Scott, bought a 40-acre parcel in 2005. Her parents have lived on a nearby parcel since 1992 and put trailers on the land and her children grew up spending summers playing on the property.
Just over the fence line of Earl’s property, about 100 feet from her home, would be part of the new town. The Earls’ home is not included in the town, even though their property would be surrounded by the town. The Earls believe, according to their lawsuit, that they were excluded from the boundaries because Anderson knew they opposed incorporation.
“What would I lose? The reality is it’s so many things,” she said. “The general open space that we have.
Earl said the sense of community between neighbors will definitely change. “My husband is able to get on his horse and go. That will change, certainly, crossing through townhomes and things like that. I’m mostly concerned about things like our resources, like our water. I’m worried about fire. … We have an abundance of wildlife. I’m concerned about air quality. I mean, there’s so many things.”
Earl is not alone in her concerns. Officials from Kamas, Oakley, Francis and the South Summit School District, in a written response to the West Hills feasibility study, questioned if the proposed municipality is financially sustainable, because it is depending so heavily on commercial and industrial development that currently does not exist.
If the town fails, they said, Summit County taxpayers would be left holding the bag.
“We feel, and the study seems to indicate, that the viability of a new West Hill township is highly suspect,” they wrote.
Criticism of the proposed township by officials from Kamas and Summit County has generated its own backlash. In May, Anderson’s law firm sent a letter to the city and county alleging that their opposition in public meetings and media interviews violates Utah law, which requires they remain neutral.
The letters, obtained through an open records request, demand that the officials “cease and desist” in their statements opposing the incorporation or go to court where Anderson intends to seek at least $500,000 each from the city and county for damage done to the incorporation effort.
Anderson said the township effort has cleared all the hurdles, including showing it could be financially feasible, and it will be up to voters to decide if they want to incorporate.
Nathan Anderson, who is not related to Derek Anderson, but is a proponent of incorporation, told The Park Record earlier this year that for him, it comes down to being able to have a say in what he can do with the land he owns.
“It’s still your property,” he said. “No one can tell you to develop it if you don’t want to. No one can tell you to put a fence around it and exclude the cattle from grazing, just like they do now. It is up to you. However, as it stands today, I am being told what I can and can’t do. … This gives us a path to control our own destiny, so to speak, by allowing the people of this community to vote, plan and decide how this community functions.”
McCaffrey understands wanting to have a say — something she says she won’t have when it comes to incorporation — but there needs to be consensus and vision, something she says is lacking in the West Hills model.
“My view is: Development happens,” she said. “Having grown up in Boulder [Colorado], I’m very aware that development will happen and there are ways you can do it that is desirable for the whole community.”
Note to readers • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
