The area is unquestionably Davis County, but the location has created an interesting dynamic. According to resident Kraig Butt, it receives police and fire services from Clinton, but it receives mail and water from Hooper.

Residents in the area consider themselves to be part of Hooper, as reflected by mailboxes that say Hooper with a Hooper zip code.

The Clinton City Council is considering annexing the area, which includes 155.136 acres of land east of 4500 West and north of 1800 North to the west of the Cranefield Golf Course.

Butt recognizes the realities that have led to the annexation – such as Davis County’s effort to push unincorporated land into cities and a history that includes potential annexation into West Point, a city Butt said a lot of residents didn’t want to be annexed into because they wanted the land to stay single-family home and rural – but he also acknowledged the difficulty of potentially trading the Hooper name and zip code for Clinton’s.

“If they change the zip code and all of the sudden your mail says Clinton, I think that will be hard for a lot of them,” Butt said. “My father-in-law has lived here 50 years. It’s always been Hooper. Always. Now, I don’t think he’d be too bothered if it actually changed to Clinton on his mail, but there’s a lot of people that it would. It’s just nostalgia. It’s just we’ve always been Hooper.”

Butt looks at what he sees on the other side of 4500 West, which is incorporated into West Point, as a reason to think the Hooper name and zip code will remain.

“When one of my neighbors built his house down there, he laughed about it because he had problems with the bank and the financing of his land because they’re like, ‘You’re not in Hooper; you’re in West Point,'” Butt said. “He had to explain to him, ‘Well, yeah, legal entity is West Point City, but I have a Hooper box. I have a Hooper zip code because I’m serviced by the Hooper post office.'”

The Hooper post office is less than two miles from Butt’s residence.

Annexation as a priority

At the Aug. 25 Davis County Commission work session, County Planner Jeff Oyler said there are 25 miles of roads in unincorporated Davis County, and regarding those roads, it “just doesn’t make a lot of sense from a budgetary and financial standpoint that we’re hip-hopping clear across the county to maintain these little tiny pieces of roads.”

A map was displayed that highlighted areas of the county that are unincorporated which the county expects or would like to be annexed into a city at a future date.

“And we will work with our 15 cities to see that those things happen,” he said.

He said the county has had significant discussions with Kaysville and Layton related to Mutton Hollow, adding that he didn’t know when annexation would happen there, but it would at some point in the future.

Oyler acknowledged there are areas that will remain unincorporated, like wetland areas on the west side of the county and foothills and mountainside areas on the east side, and he cited other challenges to incorporating land into cities.

“The landfill is in the unincorporated county, and Layton is not interested in taking it,” he said. “We’d like them to take it, but we’ve got two sewer plants, we’ve got a major oil refinery. We’ve got another landfill. … So we do have some unique challenges that we’re dealing with – Hill Air Force Base and some of the easements that are associated with it, making property undevelopable around the crash zone.”

According to Oyler, there are just 7,000 total acres countywide that can be developed. He said that’s not just the unincorporated portion.

Oyler said there are only 2,500 people living in unincorporated Davis County, which he said is a sixth of one percent of the county’s population.

“We’re not relevant from a population standpoint, from a development standpoint,” he said. “Our focuses in planning are … all of the things that we’re involved with with transportation and regional efforts.”

He said the county needs “to push new development into municipal cities.”

Trying not to act upon cities

Clinton Mayor Marie Dougherty said she’s been grateful the city has been able to go through this annexation process over a period of years because one of the things she hates the most is when people feel acted upon without having time to “wrap their brain around” what is going on.

“That’s very, very hard for the public, and elected officials often fail in that regard in that they’re moving quickly because they know what they’re doing, and they’ve already been studying it and everything, and then they don’t have the patience to bring the public along with them,” she said.

She said the city tried to create the most agricultural rural zoning that Clinton has for most of the residents.

“But even then, we recognized that our agricultural zone might not have all of the same uses or offerings that the county’s very wild west zoning would allow, and so we said, ‘Hey, we want to protect your current uses; we want to protect the things that are important to you so you don’t feel acted upon and you can live your lives the way that you do now to the greatest extent,'” she said.

“And so we created this agreement and … say they have more animals than our code would allow, we’ll grandfather those in and let them have their animals. Or say they have some old tiny tractors that our code enforcement would be like, ‘What is that? You can’t have a vehicle in your yard.’ ‘Well, it’s an old tiny tractor that we love. It’s almost like a decoration for us.’ ‘OK, well, you get to keep it’ – stuff like that that’s important to them.

“And we have that luxury. The power’s in our hands. It’s like a clean palette where you get to kind of start fresh as they’re annexing in and help people feel a part of our city and welcomed.”

Dougherty said she spent “hours and hours out there talking to the residents over the years.”

Dougherty said that she will be putting the decision of annexation on the Sept. 8 agenda.

“I haven’t heard any major angst from the council members, even privately or anything, and so I assume that it’ll go through just fine, probably unanimously,” she said.

She said if it passes, it then goes to the lieutenant governor’s office and it could be a couple months before it finally goes through.

Contact Standard-Examiner editor Ryan Comer at rcomer@standard.net.