MORGAN — Morgan County officials have joined Wasatch Peaks Ranch in appealing a judge’s determination that a group of residents properly filed paperwork aimed at challenging the developer’s planned resort project.

“This appeal is recognizing there are other rights the petitioner is ignoring,” Morgan County Attorney Garrett Smith said. The Utah Supreme Court will now take up the matter.

That is, the developer pushing the project, Wasatch Peaks Ranch, also has rights, he said. The county’s aim is to factor them as the legal process unfolds, not just the rights of the five residents pushing for a referendum to reverse the zoning change central to the development project in a bid to slow or stop it.

“As a county, we try to look at everything and treat everyone the same. We can’t just look at one side of the argument,” Smith told the Standard-Examiner in an interview.

What’s more, Smith still argues that — the Sept. 15 ruling by 2nd District Court Judge Noel Hyde notwithstanding — the five residents didn’t follow state law in filing the paperwork required to launch a petition drive against the Wasatch Peaks Ranch plans. They filed the paperwork in late 2019, hoping to petition to put the Morgan County Council’s Oct. 30, 2019, zoning decision on the Wasatch Peaks Ranch property to a vote of the public. A vote against the zoning decision — if it made its way to the ballot — could be a serious blow to the resort plans.

The legal fight over the Wasatch Peaks Ranch project started on Nov. 27, 2019, when the five residents filed suit against Morgan County after Stacy Netz Clark, then the county clerk, rejected their paperwork seeking permission to petition. Clark had said the petitioners didn’t follow the steps set out in state law, including proper certification of their Utah residency and inclusion of the pertinent ordinance they wanted to challenge with their paperwork.

Hyde ruled on Sept. 15 that the residents did, in fact, properly file the paperwork and Wasatch Peaks Ranch appealed to the Utah Supreme Court that same day. Morgan County filed its appeal last Friday, representing the consensus course of action of the five Morgan County commissioners, Clark and Smith, according to Smith.

$173,785.25 IN ATTORNEY FEES

Meantime, the lawyers representing the five plaintiffs — Whitney Croft, Robert Bohman, Brandon Peterson, Shelley Paige and David Pike — filed a motion last Friday seeking payment of their attorney fees by the county and Wasatch Peaks Ranch. The fees for three of the four attorneys who have aided the residents total $173,785.25, according to their filings in 2nd District Court last week.

Attorneys Darin Hammond and Dana Farmer, who filed the motion, argued the county and Wasatch Peaks Ranch are obliged to pay, in part, because the laws outlining their clients’ rights to seek a referendum “have not been scrupulously followed.” The motion took particular aim at Wasatch Peaks Ranch and its “abuse of the election process (with the County’s active support).”

What should have been a “simple administrative process,” the motion argued, became a lengthy legal tussle.

The petitioners and Morgan County voters “have endured three years of protracted litigation initiated and driven by (Wasatch Peaks Ranch’s) commandeering of the referendum process,” reads the motion. The firm, it went on, did so “by sending unauthorized letters, suing the County frivolously, and raising every conceivable (and imaginary) issue to hinder, avoid and defeat the Referendum, thereby depriving Petitioners and Morgan County’s citizens of their legislative privilege to conduct a referendum without a well-funded interloper pressing its corpulent thumb on the scale.”

Wasatch Peaks didn’t respond to a query Monday seeking comment. Smith, for his part, called the specter of having to pay the suing residents’ lawyers a “hidden tax.” The county would stand to lose out not only on the economic benefits of the Wasatch Peaks Ranch project if it were it stalled because of the petitioners’ efforts, he said, but also by having to cover the fees of their lawyers.

Wasatch Peaks Ranch and the county have not yet formally responded to the motion on lawyers’ fees. Likewise, the sides have yet to file formal arguments for their appeals in the Utah Supreme Court.

Work on the Wasatch Peaks Ranch project is underway. Plans call for skiing and golf amenities and new housing spread on a sprawling, largely undeveloped 12,000-acre parcel off Interstate 84 and west of Morgan.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct a misspelling in the name of Morgan County resident Robert Bohman. The Standard-Examiner regrets the error.

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