Like many people I was surprised at the sweetheart deal that our City Council and Mayor gave to the developers of the Granite Dells annexation, and especially how the Council and Mayor dealt with the water rights we had acquired with the JWK Ranch purchase.   I was even more astounded when I became aware of the "smoking gun" aspect.  The intention to benefit the developers at the expense of the taxpayers could not have been more clear as you will see in the events I next describe.

For reference's sake here is a link to the whole Agreement.

The relevent part of the Agreement for the "smoking gun" aspect is as follows: "The City agrees to waive any fees that are in effect at the time of the annexation." (last sentence of Agreement, item 2, page 2)

This Agreement, a legal binding contract between the City and the developers, was signed by the Mayor on 12th Day of January, 2004.  A couple weeks later (January 27th, 2004, resolution 3582)  the Council passed, four to three (Simmons, Blair, Roecker and Steward for, with Suttles, Lamerson and Bell against), a resolution which would charge the developers of any large (over 250 acres) annexation a $750 per acre annexation fee.  The purpose of such a fee is to defray the large costs that the City has to bear in planning and carrying out its part of the annexation process. The planning for such a fee had to have been in existence for some months, and had to be well known in the development community, to the City staff and to the Mayor and the Council (The Council Agenda Memo: Consideration of Annexation Fees, was approved by the Department Head and City Manager on 12/3/03).  Yet, on the eve of enacting this fee (1/12/04), the Mayor signs an agreement with the developers, saving them a minimum of $5.25 million dollars! (I say minimum because City staff actually proposed two fees of  $750/acre, one at the time of the City's signing the development agreement, and another at the time of actual annexation - it is the last which was passed.)  That's our money folks, not the developers' and not the Council's or the Mayor's.

Here is a quote from the memo approved 12/3/03, which shows clearly that the Granite Dells annexation was on the minds of those considering the issue (paragraph  3 of the "background" section of the memo):

"For example, the Granite Dells Ranch, which development agreement was recently brought to Council, took two years of negotiations to reach that agreement - and there is yet another agreement (and master plan) which is expected with the next two years.  And Granite Dells Ranch contemplates not having a complete build-out for possible fifty years!  And, because of the size of the proposed development, Staff will continue to spend an inordinate amount of time in  meetings and negotiations with the property owner/developer in discussing the fine points of a Master Plan for the property, another (more definitive) development agreement, etc.  In the case of large annexations, it will be decades or more before the City sees any revenue from such an annexation."
 
Please note the exclamation point at the end of sentence two above, and the adjective "inordinate" in sentence three.  Clearly Staff, in recommending a total fee of $1500/acre, and in the way it phrased the above paragraph, was telling the City Council and Mayor that the City was incurring large unpaid cost servicing private developers, whose projects might well take decades to return any value to the City.

This is only one of the sweetheart aspects of this Agreement.  Hopefully you will have heard of many more.