I’m not a fan of the Utah Legislature. To be fair, when looking at the big picture, they get the job done. State government is funded and operates better than a lot of states, the state bond rating is solid, stuff generally works. 

They even try to do the right thing now and then. They are trying to do something about the shrinking Great Salt Lake, for example, while at the same time, goosing growth that is the cause of the Lake’s demise. 

The “must-do” gets done, leaving them far too much time for recreational pursuits like banning books and their creepy fixation on public bathrooms. And creating special entities to build ski resorts without local zoning. 

On your November ballot, you will get to vote on an amendment to the Utah Constitution. It’s an amendment the Legislature thought was so urgent that they called themselves into special session to adopt it, and then also adopted a new statute changing the calendar for proposing and processing amendments, so they could rush it on to the November ballot rather than waiting until the next election, which the current schedule would have required.

So what’s this emergency that has them in such a panic? Has an important part of the tax structure been ruled unconstitutional, threatening the ability to pay for snow plows this winter? Is there an issue with the criminal code that will open the doors of the prisons? Did something change that will allow liquor to be sold any place that sells guns? Did somebody use the wrong bathroom at the airport? No, it’s far worse than that.

The Legislature is in a panic because the Utah Supreme Court recently ruled that even the Legislature itself is subject to the Utah Constitution, and the limits that places on its power. Well, I never ….

Following the 2020 U.S. Census, the states were required to revise their congressional districts so that each district is roughly equal in population. At the same time, the legislative districts for the state Legislature also get revised to balance them by population, and in Utah’s case, to unbalance them by political party. 

The process had been under the control of the Legislature, and they cravenly used it to guarantee political control by gerrymandering districts. An enclave of Democratic votes in Salt Lake and Summit Counties got split up in a way that makes it almost impossible that Democrat will ever be elected to Congress, for example. 

Utah is not unique in the abuse of the redistricting power, and both political parties do it when they can get away with it.   

A citizens group proposed a referendum that required the redistricting process to be taken away from the Legislature and handed off to a theoretically non-partisan committee appointed by the governor. That committee would draw the new maps, and the Legislature could either accept or reject them. Voters liked the idea, and the referendum passed and the independent redistricting commission became law.

The Legislature didn’t like that, and despite the referendum having passed by a vote of the citizens of Utah, the Legislature quickly passed laws that gutted the citizen-passed initiative, and put themselves back in control. The independent committee was reduced to an “advisory” role.

The sponsors of the redistricting initiative sued, and after a long grind through the court system, the Utah Supreme Court, who are all appointed by a generation of Republican Governors, ruled that the Legislature’s actions were, I think the legal term is “bull pucky.” The court said the Legislature does not have the power to materially modify initiatives passed by the voters unless there is some compelling state interest in doing so. The Legislature is not above the law.

The Legislature is having no part of that. They want us to vote to relinquish our (very limited) initiative and referendum power. Without irony, the proposed constitutional amendment starts out:  All political power is inherent in the people; and all free governments are founded on their authority for their equal protection and benefit, and they have the right to alter or reform their government through the processes [outlined in the referendum statute]. And then it goes on to rip the heart out of the referendum statute by allowing the Legislature to amend any referendum they don’t like out of existence. So much for the inherent power of the people.

Then, just for good measure, they want term limits for judges, specifically the Supreme Court justices who had the nerve to suggest that the Legislature is, in some small way,  answerable to the people. But no term limits for the members of the Legislature.

This crap passed the Utah House 54-21, and the Utah Senate 20-8. 

So what do we do about it? Well, first off, vote “no” on the amendment in November.  They apparently need a reminder that they are the hired help, not the owner of this popsicle stand. Then vote against the incumbents who supported this power grab. It’s clear that the only way to change the Legislature is to change the legislators. A depressingly high number of them are running unopposed. No wonder they think they can get away this this stuff.

And just for good measure, read a banned book in the bathroom of your choosing.

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.

The post More Dogs on Main: Legislature’s latest power grab appeared first on Park Record.

The other day I was driving home from Park City and remembered that the fridge was empty. I stopped by the Kamas Foodtown for a few groceries. Kamas is still small enough that, in the way small towns ought to work, all the important politics and business happens at the grocery store, except the stuff that gets worked out through rolled down windows of pickups stopped in the middle of the road. 

I had the good fortune to bump into Dave Ure at the doughnut case, and had a great conversation with him.

I’ve had at least a passing acquaintance with three generations of the Ure family.  Dave’s father, Ed, spent years on the irrigation company board. In this part of the world, and that long ago, the irrigation company was a lot more important than county government. 

Our families both had shares in a grazing co-op that owned a big tract of land between Oakley and Rockport for a while. Ed made the Marlboro Man look like a sissy.

I knew Dave mostly from his work on the old County Commission, and then in the state Legislature. There few political topics we ever agreed on, but when it came to looking out for  Summit County’s interests, he was always right there. I enthusiastically voted for him every time he ran for office, and would do it again if he wasn’t moving.

Chris Ure and I were on the East Side Planning Commission together for many years.  We butted heads pretty hard at times, but quickly came to realize that our vison of the future for the East Side was very similar. We just expressed it differently. I finished my term considering Chris a friend and a respected colleague. He then went on the county Health Board.

They sold their family ranch to the county, and are in the process of moving. After thanking Dave for the generations of service to the community, we got to the good stuff — what’s the new ranch like. It’s in Missouri, in a magic place where the hay grows and the pastures stay green all by themselves. No irrigation at all. No ditch company.  No water turns. No restrictions. 

To fully appreciate the joy in that, you need to know that the Ure Ranch was at the very bottom of a 15-mile ditch system with perhaps hundreds of headgates and turnouts upstream between them and the water source at the river. Despite a well-regulated system of turns and measurements, it’s fair to say there is a lot of  “shrinkage” along the way. For 130 years, they fought for every drop. No wonder his dad had a reputation for being grumpy.

Dave said people in Missouri don’t even know what a canvas dam is. And the soil is so deep that fence posts can be pushed into the ground with a tractor bucket without ever hitting river cobble, boulders or ledge rock. The cattle don’t need to be trucked to and from the desert every winter. They hang out at the home ranch and get fat in naturally watered pastures.

Their thermometers don’t go below zero. Running a ranch under those conditions might actually be profitable. 

I can’t imagine moving off a ranch that has been in the family for 130 years. We’ve been on our place about half that long, and I can’t walk a fence line without seeing a kind of horizontal totem of family and employees in the different repair techniques — that one is my grandfather, this one my uncle. My cousin’s work is easily identifiable, along with that of a hired man who worked for us for 52 years.  The kind of saggy places are my handiwork, while he was teaching me how to mend a fence. 

All of them are still present in every field and outbuilding. There are memories at every headgate, every place I nearly rolled a tractor. 

The ghosts in Ures’ fields and barns go way back. Driving away will be very hard to do, but Dave is excited about learning the new place, and the idea that maybe Chris’ kids and grandkids will be there 50 years from now. I wish them the very best on a new adventure.

On other ancestral fronts, after all the family discussion about the name on Clyde Lake in the Uintas, I hiked up there again, starting at the Trial Lake trailhead. 

We took a look at the historic Maycock family cabin. Just by chance, a family was staying there. A very friendly woman invited us in to see the nearly 100-year-old cabin. It was very cool, though we were too late for pancakes cooked on a wood-burning cook stove from ZCMI. 

I explained my family connection to the Trial Lake dam, and the disappointment at learning that Clyde Lake was apparently named for Clyde Maycock instead of my great-grandfather. 

She laughed and said that her family built the cabin in 1926, and by that time, everything around them was already named. Her great-uncle Clyde Maycock had nothing to do with Clyde Lake other than fishing there. There was even a note on the wall saying that.

So I feel somewhat vindicated, not that it matters. Clyde Lake was named for my great- grandfather. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. 

The post More Dogs on Main: Best wishes for the Ure family appeared first on Park Record.

To her dying day, my aunt maintained that Clyde Lake in the Uintas was named for our family. It certainly seemed plausible. 

My great-grandfather was the chief engineer and construction manager on the early dams on Trial, Washington, and other lakes in that area around 1910. They stored water in the spring and dumped it down the Provo River in the late summer for irrigation companies from Provo to Woodland. The story got grafted into family lore as that sort of thing does, but there was no evidence behind it other than she said so. She was not one to be questioned.

We’ve all camped there through the years, and after a recent hike, a couple of family members started asking about it, and we began to do some digging. It turns out my aunt was wrong. 

One of the first forest rangers up there was John Maycock, and he named the lake after his son, who liked to fish there. The kid’s first name was Clyde. The Maycock cabin is still there on the bank of Trial Lake, one of a few surviving out of several that were built there in the early 1900’s. 

The correction doesn’t change anything. The big glacial slab of polished rock that slopes down into the lake is still as nice a place to each lunch as anywhere on earth.

While digging online for that, I came across a great memoir by the wife of the first dam keeper up there, Marion Clegg. The Clegg family, including little kids, lived there in the summers to manage the reservoir releases for 40 years, beginning in about 1920. 

There was a telephone in the dam keeper’s cabin at Trial Lake in 1913. That’s the year that the Kamas-Woodland Telephone Company was founded. It’s now All West Communications, and provides phone and internet service to a whole lot of people from Empire Pass to Wyoming. 

I don’t know if the phone line that ran 27 miles up the canyon from Kamas to Trial Lake was owned by the phone company or by the reservoir owners. The phone company went broke rather quickly, and if they ran a line 27 miles for one seasonal connection, it’s not hard to see why. But it’s a little hard to get my head around the idea that there was phone service up there in 1913, and there isn’t now. 

The Cleggs ran something of a lodge there in what sounds like a large cabin, originally built to house workers on the dam where you could buy a candy bar there if the squirrels that had free run of the house didn’t get to it first.  

I think of the Uintas as a vast, empty, wild space. 

It kind of is, now, other than it was pretty darn busy over the weekend. 

But 100 years ago, it would have been alive with loggers, road builders (by the 1920s you could drive to Trial Lake in a Model T Ford), livestock operations and recreation people. The cabins at Trial Lake would have been the center of the action.

There had been a history of ice jams clogging the spillways on the dams, causing the spring runoff to wash them out. The first attempt at dam building, an experiment that led to the name Trial Lake, failed. So they decided to inspect the dams in the winter and keep an eye on things. 

There was no winter maintenance on the very primitive road up from Kamas. The article said they instead drove through Woodland, where there was a plowed road (sort of), then snowshoed up the Provo River to Trial Lake. Must have taken days. Those guys were tough. Now they control the release gates on the dams from air conditioned offices in Orem. 

My niece bought a book called “Utah Place Names,” by John VanCott, looking for more documentation. The book says that Dean Lake was named for Dean Clyde without any further context. 

So who the heck is Dean Clyde, and why is there a lake named for him? That’s my grandfather, who was a sheep rancher. His father and grandfather were also in the sheep business, and had grazing permits on the Forest Service land in the general area. 

The Sunday hike was to explore Dean Lake, and it was spectacular, like all of the Uinta Lakes. It was off the trail and took some bushwhacking to get to. We missed it on the way in and had lunch at Bench Lake instead. Nothing wrong with that, and after studying the map a little more, found it on the way out. 

In reading on-line trail guides to find it, I kind of skipped over a weird reference.  There are actually two Dean Lakes in the Uintas, one in Four Lakes Basin and the other off the Bald Mountain trail. There are also two Nobletts Creeks in the general area. No wonder Search & Rescue is so busy. 

Turns out we hiked to the wrong one. The entry in “Utah Place Names” has the coordinates for the other one. That location makes more sense in terms of where the family would have been grazing. It looks like a much longer hike, maybe an overnighter, but I now need to go explore that one. 

I’ll be very disappointed if I learn that Clyde Maycock had a brother named Dean.

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.

The post More Dogs on Main: What’s in a name? appeared first on Park Record.

The architect and developer on the redevelopment of the Yarrow hotel (which will always be the Holiday Inn to me) gave a detailed presentation on the proposal to the Park City Rotary Club. 

I assume they were trying to drum up support as the project moves to the next Planning Commission hearing. It mostly didn’t. 

The proposal was unusually well presented, with lots of renderings, video simulations of walking by it and around it, and even though none of us will likely see it from a drone’s eye view, we got fly-through tours. It looked like the completed project. Amazing what the technology will do now.  It used to be all colored marker pen sketches.

It is a perfectly acceptable building, or collection of buildings, stacked on a single underground garage, then wrapped in Browns Canyon sandstone, wood and steel. It’s vastly better than anything at Kimball Junction. It makes the architectural chowder in Prospector look even more low-budget than it is. It’s the kind of building that would be a welcome improvement to any suburban office park anywhere in the country, from Tacoma to Indianapolis. 

It’s perfectly fine. And that is exactly the problem. “Fine” isn’t good enough for that location.

The site is the most prominent corner in town. It is the front door to Park City, and really needs to say so in a distinctly Park City way. Instead, the proposal says, “Welcome to your 10 a.m. dental appointment.” 

If it gets built as planned, it won’t be the end of the world. It’s definitely an improvement over what’s there now. But it would be a tragically wasted opportunity.

The site is more challenging that it first appears. At 4.5 acres, it’s big, but not big enough to really go all out. The neighboring properties are a sea of asphalt with modestly updated 1970s strip malls around it. 

It’s not like the Hotel Park City site with the golf course in the back yard. There are other realities. It’s not slope-side, so room rates and condo prices will be lower, and that will constrain budgets. If required to build underground parking spaces for each of the proposed affordable housing units, at maybe $75,000 apiece, they quickly aren’t affordable any more.

But people have cars, and resident parking can’t be foisted off on Fresh Market. At the junction of two over-capacity state highways, the site lacks the tranquility of the Montage. Outdoor dining overlooking the parade of dump trucks or the strip mall parking lots lacks charm.

Traffic flow is broken and it feels like every decision by local governments in the region is designed to make it worse. Adding more density is about as popular as another bout of Covid. New streets are needed to move the access to the whole neighborhood off the highways. But new roads eat up usable land. 

The city codes are ancient and out of date. They stifle creativity. The basic zoning framework was established in the early 1980s. I wrote a lot of it nearly 45 years ago, when the idea of anybody building a three-story building, that far out of town, was as ludicrous as presidential candidates routinely coming to town to shake the local money tree. 

Even a visionary City Council back then couldn’t foresee where we are now.  So redeveloping the site isn’t cheap or easy. 

There is a generational opportunity here, and the city needs to be proactive working with the developer and trading zoning concessions on height, density and possibly parking for a design that becomes as iconic at the McPolin Barn. 

And the developer needs to respect the unique position of the site as the front door of Park City. Ordinary isn’t enough.

The master-planned development provisions of the city code provide some flexibility, but basically restack the allowable density higher to get a smaller footprint.There’s some nibbling at the parking calculations. They are asking for a height exception. I don’t think this proposal merits that. 

The site deserves a radically different process that would be to invite the developer to basically ignore the 1980s zoning and present a plan that does justice to the location’s prominence. If the city likes it, zoning can be amended to fit the project. 

The city ought to be helping to create a landmark there. Instead we have an attractive, but anodyne project.

Everybody has their own taste in design, and it’s easy to throw ideas out there when it’s somebody else’s money at risk. I think of something like the Sun Valley Lodge, the national park hotels, or a design that pulls from our mining past. Not a replica of the old Coalition Mines building, but echoes of it.  

Others may want something more forward-looking. The Kimball Art Center’s Lincoln Log building would be spectacular at that location. Something risky. Something as wonderfully audacious as Park City itself. 

Fifty years from now, if there is a discussion about tearing down whatever gets built there, we need a landmark so iconic that the town will lay down in front of bulldozers to save it. 

That site deserves something spectacular, and the city and the developer need to find the flexibility to make it happen. As Ted Lasso said, “Don’t you dare settle for fine.”

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.

The post More Dogs on Main: Don’t settle for fine appeared first on Park Record.

The costs of putting it on have become so ridiculous that fewer cities are willing to bid. A system of rotating venues makes so much sense that not even the IOC can deny it.

That’s such a radical difference from the 1998 bid, which we didn’t get, and the successful 2002 bid. In 1998, we were literally out-bribed by Nagano. They thoroughly schooled us in the ins and outs of what was a completely corrupt process. 

So for 2002, we were the successful bidder — the under the table costs of which will never really be known. As Justice Clarence Thomas would describe it, they were gratuities, not bribes.

Coming months after the 9/11 attack, with the nation still rattled and frightened, the Games took on a higher level of importance in the national psyche. People who had never seen snow cared about the Winter Olympics that year. 

Security preparations in town were nothing short of oppressive. I remember skiing down an otherwise deserted Perseverance Bowl only to have a military helicopter rise up in front of me close enough I could see the pilot’s face, missiles pointed right at me. Practice makes perfect. 

We pulled it off, triumphantly. I don’t care two roadkill potguts about the competitions, but was fully engaged with it. I watched what I could in person, spent hours on Main Street and in a fully transformed downtown Salt Lake (there were people on the sidewalks and businesses open after 6 p.m.!). I had a minor volunteer position that allowed me to get into events without tickets and experience some great people. 

I’ll always remember a young couple who said they were home in their apartment in Chicago, watching it on TV, and spontaneously decided to get dressed and drive to Utah that night. They showed up at my information booth after a ski jump event and wondered if I knew of a hotel room. Local organizers had it so dialed in that I had a list, and as long as they didn’t mind changing hotels every night, they could pick up a single here and there for almost nothing.

Another couple came by and asked for directions to walk back to their Kimball Junction hotel — in the dark, in the post-event traffic. I told them to get a cup of coffee, my shift ended in a half hour, and I would drive them so they didn’t get run over walking down S.R. 248, which didn’t have a foot path back then. 

Another family explained they were in a motor home, and were camped way out in the sticks. They wanted to know if I knew anyplace closer. When I asked where they were camped, it was just up the street from my house. They refilled their water tank from my hose.

A Swiss kid set a record on the ski jump. It honestly looked like he was going to land on the roof of Walmart. I watched it happen.

There’s no question that the Olympics changed Utah. 

Before, there was a winter sports competition base here, but it wasn’t a whole lot. The World Cup races drew modest crowds for free. 

After, it seemed like every kid in town had Olympic dreams. If you can see it, you can be it. Suddenly a gold medalist is mixing paint for me at Home Depot or reviewing subdivision plans in the county planning department. In later years, we joked that there were cul-de-sacs in Snyderville that won more medals than several whole countries. 

To the limited extent Utah was known to the rest of the world, it had a reputation for being weird. When organizers polled to find out what Utah’s image was in the rest of the country, the answer was, “Huh?”  

After the Olympics, Salt Lake was certifiably cool. Goldman Sachs has several thousand employees in Salt Lake who I’m certain would not be here but for the Olympics. After the Olympics, the move to Utah seemed plausible. I’m guessing that a lot of people reading this now are here in large part because of the Olympics, though it’s hard to draw a straight line.

A lot of the changes have been healthy, dragging the state into the modern world or somewhat closer to it. But it also spurred a period of rapid growth that the state has not planned for adequately. Freeways built by shaking the Olympic money tree are already overloaded, housing is too expensive, and natural resources are stretched. 

Until they can figure out how to build another Alta or Moab, maybe we should stop building other stuff that is overloading them.

The growth may have happened anyway, and without the Olympic cash infusion (the Salt Lake City light rail system is an Olympic legacy more important that the speed skating oval), things might be even messier because the state can’t afford to build all that on its own. Twenty-two years later, I’m still undecided whether the party was worth the hangover.

I don’t think the 2034 games will cause the same kind of social and economic earthquake as 2002.  That bobsled is already down the track. I hope it is as successful as 2002. It was magic.

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.

The post More Dogs on Main: We got the Olympics appeared first on Park Record.

While doing my best to escape the real news, my newsfeed accommodated nicely, and suddenly was overflowing with articles about a new breed of designer dogs. There were dozens of articles, each borrowing heavily from the others. 

The source appears to be an article in New York Magazine by Ben Ryder Howe, in an attempt to give credit where due. Howe’s article describes a couple in Bozeman, Montana — the thoroughly spoiled, brie-and-Birkenstock epicenter of the Treasure State — about a brain surgeon and his wife. They had made a gob of money and moved to Montana. They probably read “A River Runs Through It,” then packed the Range Rover.

They were at a farmers market and saw a booth selling dogs. They thought the dogs were handsome, pretty much adults rather than pups, and took a closer look. The dogs were priced at $150,000. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars. For one dog. Does that include the first shots? And what kind of farmers market sells $150,000 dogs? (See brie and Birkenstocks, above.) 

The husband thought that was nuts, but his wife was smitten. The appeal is they are specially trained dogs. The article said they are “military-grade protection dogs with elite danger-sensing instincts, but the warmth and temperament of a family pet.”

The idea seems to be that you have a nice, cuddly dog who can be with you at Starbucks or anywhere — they are trained to fly in private helicopters for that long commute from the Bozeman airport to your ranch on the river. These warm, fuzzy pets are perfect with friends and family, but will rip the trachea out of the UPS driver if he looks at them the wrong way while delivering their gourmet meals. Who wouldn’t want a pet like that?

The dogs are sold as adults, after two or three years of intensive training. Training? For $150,000, they better come with a medical degree and poop Rolexes. The surgeon and his wife bought one. But the dog was lonesome, having spent all its life training with other dogs. So they did the only reasonable thing. They bought another one. 

They might have gone to the local shelter and picked up a mutt who would love them forever, but you know. Rich people. How can they expect their elite killer/pet to associate with a shelter dog? Can you imagine a military-grade fur baby hanging out with some rescue from the reservation? Eeew. 

These people have an image to uphold. So they bought a second of the Navy Seal dogs. That’s $300,000 in dogs. As a point of reference, the median price for a house in the United States is $419,000, and most people can’t afford that. A large dog like that might live for 12 or 14 years, while a median-priced house will last longer than you. IRS says you can depreciate a killer dog over seven years, and deduct the trainer’s pay. So there’s that.

The breeder said they interview the dog buyers carefully, and won’t sell to just anybody. The buyers have to commit to maintaining the training regimen (i.e., hiring a professional dog trainer to do it for them). And they have to be stupid rich. 

One of the articles quoted the trainer as saying she has a “no A-holes” rule when screening buyers. It seems like some rich twit spending $150,000 on a dog trained to kill the neighbor kid basically defines that term. But whatever. 

She also said that the dogs were very popular among the members of the Yellowstone Club, the ultra-exclusive private ski area near Big Sky. Which again raises doubts about the “no A-holes” rule.

If they are popular among the Yellowstone Club set, I can only imagine what we will get at Wasatch Peaks. If you haven’t followed that one, Wasatch Peaks is a huge private golf and ski resort over in Morgan where their market is mostly people who think the Yellowstone Club has gone to hell and been polluted by the likes of Justin Timberlake. Once tattooed celebrities start moving in, you might as well be in the Hamptons. 

Membership in Wasatch Peaks is very carefully screened. It has no internet presence, and for all practical purposes, the place is invisible. And their members like it that way. Employees are sworn to a level of secrecy that makes the Masons look like gossips.

So among that group, one has to assume that there are a few $150,000 dogs keeping watch, especially now that there is a special airline that flies dogs around the country. Bark Air will fly you and your dog from New York to Los Angeles for $6,000 — one way. 

I don’t think there are discounts for shelter dogs or carry-on yappers. There may be a surcharge for dogs trained to rip the pilot’s heart out, but I am not in that market and haven’t seen the rate card.

Did I mention that the world is badly broken and we need to fix it. 

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.

The post More Dogs on Main: The latest on designer dogs appeared first on Park Record.

It seemed like a questionable idea from the get go.

It would be a lie to say that I took care of them. But that is a lie they repeatedly told their adult children, scattered around the country. I changed a few light globes when there were ladders involved, jump started the car now and then, and generally paid enough attention as I drove out to see that there were lights on in different windows from the day before, and smoke coming from the chimney. 

They knew they could call if they needed a hand, but it’s not like I was fixing their dinner. Their family had been led to believe that the neighbors had developed a support system better than assisted living, which is curious because there really aren’t any other neighbors. We had a bond based on a mutual love of a place and the sounds of the river.

They have both been dead and gone for a long time now. Their children kept the cabin and use it as a vacation place through the warmer months, and close it down in the winter. I know a few of them — it’s a large family — and send an occasional update in the winter if they need to get their roof shoveled and the like. 

The people in the house are probably their grandchildren by now, which would make the swarm of cousins playing in the river a sixth generation of that family. 

The kids play in the river for hours every day, starting as soon as the air warms up a bit, and lasting until almost dark, objecting to coming in, even for meals. I assume they start the day getting baptized in sun screen and bug repellent, and are then turned loose in the river.

I can only imagine the response from non-free-range parents who would never let their kids walk to a neighborhood park, let alone playing in the river. Call the authorities!

Playing in the river is an essential life skill. They are engineering piles of rocks that steer the river in curving s-turn chutes, and swimming holes that are almost deep enough the get fully submerged in.  The water level is dropping quickly this time of year, so getting much depth is a challenge. 

When the sun gets too hot, they move upstream and play in the cool shade under the bridge. There is a mud flat beach formed on the downstream side. The riverbed widens out below the bridge and the sand drops out. Under the bridge is a different, cave-like world. It shakes when the logging trucks drive over it.

They learn the difference between an inadvertent splash and a deliberate soaking from a well-tossed rock. They learn to watch out for each other’s toes, and how two or three of them can work together to roll a boulder, and when a mashed finger is worth running inside to Mom or something you just suck up because there is a swimming hole to be built. 

A month ago, when the runoff was raging and the river was crashing boulders around with the force of the water, nobody would let their kid get within 50 feet of it. Now, at the slack summer flow, it’s a playground. 

So far, I’ve resisted tossing a rock off the bridge to create surprise splash, but it’s not out of the question. I know a thing or two about playing in the river, too.

I re-read Norman Maclean’s book “A River Runs Through It” this week. It’s one of my favorite, and fascinating to read it at different stages of life when, like the unseen currents in the river, a familiar story reveals something entirely new. 

The decision to read it again was prompted by a wonderful piece in The New Yorker by Kathryn Schultz. She said when her own writing hit a wall, reading Maclean was always an inspiration. It’s a book about place and family and love and trying to help. 

Help is a complicated thing, and often rejected by those it’s offered to, yet the offering itself is also help. To both parties. 

The book also has a lot of fly fishing in there. For somebody who doesn’t fish, it doesn’t get in the way.

The book was made into a very good movie (though nothing’s as good as the book), and the combination exploded the world of fly fishers. It sold gear and clothes and created a whole culture. It wreaked havoc on Montana, when everybody in New York and Chicago decided they needed a home in Montana where they could price out the locals and fly fish like Brad Pitt in the movie — though presumably not end up dead in an alley. 

In the meantime, the next generation is out there again this morning, playing in the river where pretty much all you need to know is learned. A river runs through it.

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.

The post More Dogs on Main: Playing in the river appeared first on Park Record.

If eating another hot dog will solve it, put a couple on the grill for me. I suspect preserving the American experiment requires something more from we, the people.

I’m still shell shocked from the presidential debate. Biden had to do only one thing — go out there and demonstrate that he was alive. Trump could be counted on for self-inflicted wounds, spewing BS all night. Biden didn’t need to do much to hold his own against that. But he absolutely failed. He shuffled out on the stage looking lost and confused, and went downhill from there.

The highlight of the discussion, the one point when they engaged in any kind of cogent exchange, was over which of the failing old men has the better golf game. 

My reaction watching it was that it was time to roll out the 25^th Amendment. If not now, when? Four more years? I’m worried about four more months.

Biden’s team said it was just a bad night. He had a cold. In fairness, at a couple campaign events the next day, he was the “State of the Union” version of Joe Biden — feisty, engaging, coherent. 

But even if it was a one-off, it was worse than a bad night. Drunken Teddy Kennedy driving his car off a bridge and drowning a young one-night stand was a bad night. Appearing on the stage of a presidential debate unable to string three words together, staring off into space, and everything short of wetting his pants was worse than a bad night. 

Since the train wreck, people have been chattering about the need to replace him on the ballot. I suspect there would be a high level of agreement with the idea that Joe needs to be sent out to pasture. It ends there — and there is no level of agreement on who or how to replace him this late in the process. A free-for-all convention ends with a split party and a new candidate who has to make a national introduction in a couple of months. Not going to happen.

Our choice in November will be between senile and sedition. Can we shove the two-party system into the wood chipper now? We need a system that opens a primary to anybody who can get a significant number of petition signatures in something like 35 states. 

There needs to be some filter to weed out the crazies, so demonstrating enough support to gather signatures in a lot of places helps. Then we have a national primary and narrow it down to some manageable number. Then a final election, and maybe if nobody wins more than 50%, the top two do a run off. 

If the useless parties want to endorse somebody, let them. But they clearly don’t deserve their lock on whose name gets on the ballot. Not when they deliver this choice.

There are big issues out there. Climate change is happening right now. The economy is booming if you look at statistics, a rising tide that lifts all boats. That’s great if you have a boat. The people without boats are drowning. 

The world seems more unstable than any time since I was hiding under my desk in elementary school during our “duck and cover” drills because that sheet of particle board was going to protect us from the Russian nukes.

The Supreme Court has granted presidents some kind of super powers and immunity. They also more or less shut down experts and scientists at the administrative agencies. The regulatory framework has become overcomplicated and inefficient. It’s also often ineffective. Everything is complicated, and the administrative process is supposed to put real experts in charge of the minute details of regulations. 

Now the Supreme Court wants to have judges (who went to law school to avoid all that math and science stuff), not chemists and biologists, decide how many parts per billion of kryptonite is safe in our drinking water.

Congress, of course, could modify the administrative process. They could provide meaningful oversight and more clearly define the goals and intentions of regulatory statutes. Congress could do a lot, but it doesn’t do anything. They show up long enough to shout at each other about nothing, and then take a well-earned three week vacation. We keep reelecting them anyway.

I have a plan. Since the only point of real engagement at the debate debacle was golf, let’s start there.  Jill and Melania need to go to lunch and figure out a way to get Joe and Donald to leave all the stupid, boring politics behind and devote their few remaining years to something that matters — improving their short game. 

Don and Joe could drop out and sponsor golf tournaments for the aged. Maybe they can get the families involved. Hunter and Don Jr. seem to share a lot of common interests. And with both of the old guys out of the way, maybe the two parties could partially redeem themselves by nominating two new living, competent candidates. Jill, Melania, we’re counting you.

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.

The post More Dogs on Main: Jill, Melania, ladies, it’s all up to you appeared first on Park Record.

There were some significant races on the docket. The governor’s office, a replacement for Mitt Romney in the Senate (far too reasonable to be reelected), and of course the congressional districts. I guess there were really no surprises.  On the Senate race, U.S. Rep. John Curtis is now the likely replacement for Mitt Romney. Local resident Caroline Gleich is running as a Democrat. The last time Utah sent a Democrat to the Senate, I was in high school. But it could happen.

Curtis’ most serious challenger seemed to be Trent Staggs, a former mayor of Riverton, one of the boomtowns in southwestern Salt Lake County. What I know of Curtis is that he is a rare Republican who recognizes climate change is real. But there was that day when he showed up at the groundbreaking of the county’s bus garage, all smiles and front and center despite having voted against the funding in Congress. So there’s that.

All I was able to learn of Staggs, aside from being endorsed by Trump, is that he is a “tax and spend liberal.” That seems like an odd description of a guy who was endorsed by Trump himself. But I got a pile of mailers denouncing him as a “tax and spend liberal.” They are coming from a group called Defend American Jobs based in Alexandria, Virginia. And if you can’t believe Defend American Jobs when they call somebody a liberal, who can you believe?

The mailers, which keep coming despite the election being over, are an obvious hit job from a political action committee that supports some other candidate. They don’t have to say who they are supporting, where their money came from, or what business a Utah election is to a group in Alexandria, Virginia. It’s the worst kind of money that pollutes our election process. Absolutely no transparency. They have no website. 

There is no place to see what motivates Defend American Jobs to spend $16.5 million on the 2024 election, so far. According to a watchdog group, Open Secrets, they spent about $15 million in favor of Republican candidates, and $1.5 million against Republican candidates, like Staggs, in primary races. 

Where did it come from? Who do they want to win instead? Did they have a booth at the Silly Market where you could contribute to their cause? Nope. All invisible. No disclosure of any kind. Not only were the mailers, and a lot of similar TV time, a hit job, it was apparently flat out wrong. But thanks for the information, Defend American Jobs, whoever the hell you are.

Staggs won in Washington County, which is St. George and surrounding communities, some of which had ordinances mandating a gun in every home. Not a liberal stronghold, but Staggs, who Defend American Jobs says is a liberal, carried the vote there. 

There was darn little in the campaign that would have informed anybody about his views, or really those of any of the other candidates. When it comes to useful information, whatever the candidates spent on the election was wasted. Voters are largely left in the dark.

In the governor’s race, incumbent Cox won handily against conservative firebrand and Trump acolyte (and pardon recipient) Phil Lyman. Lyman carried most of southern Utah, and a kind of close win in Morgan County.

One oddity that jumped out was the attorney general race. For years, the Utah Attorney General’s Office has been led by people with some ethical lapses. There were three candidates trying to get the Republican nomination, none running on a reform platform. I have no information on any of them, and Defend American Jobs did not provide some disinformation. 

Rachel Terry, the lone woman on the list, won in San Juan County, while losing in the other 28 counties.   She got 42 percent there, and the nearest competitor got 37 percent of a total of 1,761 votes. Why she would be so popular in that corner of the state is anybody’s guess, but if you were going to focus your campaign in one area of the state, San Juan County probably wouldn’t be the best choice. There are 14,000 people there. Maybe Defend American Jobs went to bat for her down there on the Navajo Reservation. 

A bright spot in all of this was that Brad Wilson, former speaker of the Utah House of Representatives, lost big in the Senate race. Wilson is best known locally for using his legislative seat to facilitate last-minute amendments to accomplish special favors for his developer pals. While that kind of behavior would be right at home in Congress, it was something of a comfort to see him rejected.

I still wish we had a “none of the above” box on the ballot. That would be a sure winner.

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.

The post More Dogs on Main: Defend American Jobs to the rescue appeared first on Park Record.

For starters, unlike other Supreme Courts that have become corrupt partisan tools, the Utah Supreme Court is still on the up and up. Nobody’s buying them motor homes. 

If you haven’t been following this like “American Ninja Warriors,” here’s the scoop. The town of Hideout, on the east side of Jordanelle in Wasatch County, was approached by the owner of property in Richardson Flat. That land is in Summit County, and is generally above the old tailings pond. The land owner was getting nowhere with Summit County on the approval he wanted, so he approached Hideout. The first attempt to annex didn’t work because of technical objections raised by Summit County. 

So the owner did what any Utah developer would do — he approached the Utah Legislature for a special favor. Unlike the Utah Supreme Court, the Utah Legislature seems to be rotten to the core, which is to be expected after a generation of one-party rule. It’s worked so well in China and Russia, for example.  The landowner got his cronies in the Legislature to slip a provision into boring housekeeping bill on land use that allowed a town to annex land in another county without that county’s consent. Done deal, Hideout did it, and off to the courthouse.

The special deal law was in place for about 100 days. When the rest of the legislators realized that once again they had been bamboozled by corrupt “leadership,” the provision got repealed. But it was there long enough to work its mischief.

If you are keeping score at home, it’s Hideout 2, Responsible Government 0. Hideout itself exists only because of similar legislative shenanigans that allowed the incorporation of towns with no people in them. The property owners in the new towns could write their own zoning laws, which in Hideout’s case got them past some difficult Wasatch County regulations. 

Hideout is an egregious example. Bryce Canyon City is another example. In that case, almost all of the sales tax revenue in Garfield County is generated out of Ruby’s Inn at the entrance to Bryce. But the population of Garfield County lives in Panguitch, and the county spent all the sales tax money there.  After incorporation, Bryce Canyon City was able to keep the sales tax it generates. 

The Supreme Court’s decision wasn’t that the Hideout annexation (or Hideout itself), or the legislative skullduggery, were good ideas. It simply decided that as the law was written, for all of 100 days, the Utah Legislature said that Summit County had no legally recognized interest in the annexation process.  In other words, it was none of Summit County’s business because the Legislature said it wasn’t. The Court was awfully polite, and never once called the Legislature a cesspool full of crooks. But they were thinking it.

So where do we go from here? I assume that Hideout will complete the annexation that has been held up by the litigation. That may or not be terrible. In the debate between density and sprawl, Hideout has enthusiastically said “yes.” The great irony of Hideout is that in a town where the developer wrote the zoning, he neglected to allow anyplace for a grocery store. It’s impossible to buy a cup of coffee in Hideout except maybe the golf course, let alone groceries. So the annexation area likely will include a clone of every mistake made at Kimball Junction. Whatever happens will surely make the traffic on 248 worse. 

On the plus side, there’s an opportunity to build some less expensive housing out there, a place to put some of the necessary, but not pretty, businesses a community needs, like a place to get your oil changed. Maybe the Harmons store that got shot down at the outlet mall finds a home in Hideout.  Trader Joes? Target? Or a pile of fast food outlets.  

If there’s a bright spot, and that’s a low bar, it’s that the ownership appears to have changed. The Larry H. Miller Group purchased most of Richardson Flat. Park City annexed that. The Hideout annexation property is in the name of Hideout Community Advancement and Development LLC, which sounds as benign as the Sisters of Mercy. That was the group behind the legislative sleaze that made all of this possible. Who could object to “community advancement?” 

But since all of this started, the Miller Group has also bought either all or at least what seems to be a controlling interest in Community Advancement. So it’s all under one ownership, split between Hideout and Park City’s jurisdictions. The last time we had a parcel of land that size in one ownership was Deer Valley. There are planning opportunities there that wouldn’t exist with multiple owners and property lines.

In a perfect world, or even a marginally functional one, there would be some regional discussion between Hideout and Park City.  Even the two counties. There is huge potential out there in the wasteland for solving a lot of regional problems, not the least of which is getting a grocery store to serve everybody living around Jordanelle. It will take some diplomacy and cooperation. The Miller Group is a competent and financially solid developer. It could work. 

Or we can just let it rip, because what could possibly go wrong in Hideout?

The post More Dogs on Main: Hideout 2, Responsible Government zero appeared first on Park Record.