Credit Summit County
Tuesday, Dec. 15 was the final meeting in 2020 for the Council of Governments consisting of Summit County Council Members and Mayors from around the county.
One topic at the COG meeting was concern over the partly-finished trail linking Oakley and Kamas along State Road 32.
Council Member Roger Armstrong told us that for fellow Council Member Doug Clyde, an Oakley resident, the group South Summit Trails, and many others, finishing the trail is critical for the safety of bikers and walkers along that roadway.
He said a wetlands analysis has been done on the trail, and the county will move forward next year on further design.
Credit Snyderville Basin Planning Commission
The Summit County Council on Wednesday approved an ordinance setting up a new type of Snyderville Basin Transit District. County Council Member Roger Armstrong says that is a big step not only for the County, but could affect many transit stakeholders in the whole Wasatch Back.
Roger Armstrong said they’ve had a Transit District for a while, but starting back in the 1990s, it contracted with Park City for service.
Armstrong told KPCW that growth has occurred in the Basin, and the county has garnered revenue with new transit sales taxes, so the city and county started to think about different roles.
Credit Summit County
The Summit County Council was slammed in 2020 with unexpected challenges. However, one of their final actions of the year, last Wednesday, was relatively normal, but important.
The Council received a Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (or CAFR for short) and the results of their independent audit.
One change is that the county retained a new outside auditor. Council Member Roger Armstrong told us this was a good idea.
“Yeh, I think it’s always, whether you’re a business or a government entity, anything where you have financials that require annual audits, it’s always a good idea to change up the auditors. It’s a smart business thing to do. And it’s good security, just so you don’t fall into a pattern of somebody either making the same mistakes, or the possibility of some fraud being able to be perpetuated by having one single auditor forever.”
Credit Roger Armstrong
In his last interview for 2020, we asked County Council Member Roger Armstrong to reflect on an earthshaking year. In response, Armstrong said from his vantage point, he saw county officials and staff rising to the challenges of a pandemic and more.
Armstrong said that at this time last year, it’s safe to say, nobody in the world was predicting 2020.
“I’m thinking all of us, thinking as human beings, anticipated that life was gonna go on the way we normally wanted it to, and then that changed abruptly. And we started the year off, I think we had earthquakes, we had the pandemic, we had all kinds of ridiculous things happening all at the same time. They said, “Okay, 2020’s gonna be different than you expected.” And then in the middle of all that the Hideout controversy started, and we had to convert resources to that.”