June 11, 2000 By BRYAN CORLISS Standard-Examiner staff They say you can't fight city hall. And if you look at a map of the Wasatch Front, it's easy to see why: The cities have got us surrounded, and practically out-numbered. The U.S. Census Bureau counted 62 incorporated cities in Davis, Salt Lake, Utah and Weber counties in 1998. Two years later, there are four more, not counting Hooper, the rural Weber County community that voted to form a new city last month. This pattern - a patchwork quilt of cities and towns stitched together along Interstate 15 - has distinctly Utah roots. In Weber County, Brigham Young himself decided the junction of the Ogden and Weber rivers was the right place for a city, and he designated the surrounding land to be farming districts, bestowing names on such places as Pleasant View, Slaterville and Uintah. "I like to say our community was founded in 1850. It just wasn't incorporated until 1999," said Duncan Murray, Come together-Does it make sense to combine all city services into one entity? Monday: And never the twain shall meet - Would the "Bonneville City" proposal have worked? Tuesday: "North View" - It works for fire safety, how about all government service? the city attorney and administrator for recently formed Marriott-Slaterville. But it's hardly a pattern peculiar to Utah, say experts in urban planning. The most extreme example may be greater Los Angeles, said Eugene Carr at the University of Utah. There, more than 120 incorporated cities and towns have blurred together as they've grown to fill up most of Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties. Does this make sense? Probably not, the experts say. The fractured urban communities struggle to pay for basic services - police, fire and streets. They chase after retail development, which brings in sales taxes. And they build up agencies that duplicate each others' functions, and take even more tax dollars to support. Recognition of this is one of the things driving backers of Envision Utah, the group pushing a "Quality Growth Initiative" for the Wasatch Front. And it also pushed the Standard-Exarniner to look at one particular question: Would it make sense to erase the lines on the map and have just one government agency do all the planning and provide all the essential services, eliminating the duplication? We'll look at answers, and alternatives, today, Monday and Tuesday. Pioneer spirit Young was Utah's original urban planner. A century-and-a-half before Envision Utah, he urged early Weber County residents "not to settle in the country, but to 'move on to the city lots, build good houses, school houses, meeting houses and other public places, fence their gardens and plant out fruit trees, that Ogden might be a permanent city and suitable headquarters for the north country,'" wrote Weber State University professors Richard Roberts and Richard Sadler in their 1997 book "A History of Weber County." His vision, the authors wrote, was of an Ogden City filled with people, while the rest of Weber County between the Wasatch and Great Salt Lake was reserved as farmland. Ogden dwellers received 20-acre parcels in town. If they wanted more farmland outside the city limits, they could claim it, so long as their homes were in town. But what actually happened was different, Roberts said. "People settled where it was convenient," and that usually was along the rivers and streams flowing down from the mountains. They diverted water from those sources to irrigate crops. The more people there were m a rural area, like West Weber, the more people were available to help dig those irrigation projects, Roberts said. "You can dig longer water lines. As more came in they started planning and pushing out. Once you get a community of people you can extend the communities farther out." Weber County's patchwork of small towns was created between 1850 and 1900, Roberts and Sadler wrote. They followed a general pattern: A few Mormon families would settle in an area, then would form an LDS ward, and then would form a city government. The same pattern held true through much of Utah, said Ted Hebert, a professor of political science at the University of Utah. In the early days, church and state weren't separate, but synonymous, Roberts and Sadler wrote. "The presence of church control initially made civil government somewhat superfluous, since practically all the people were Mormons and their ecclesiastical government managed much of their lives." Under the direction of these spiritual/civic leaders - many handpicked by Young and the other church authorities - the pioneers began to dig irrigation canals from the rivers to their farms, and then build roads to get their produce into town. These were the first local government services. The result of this early pattern of settlement was a collection of independent communities, in which a few families have played key roles even to this day, said Tom Christopolous, the director of economic development for Layton. Each has its own history, its own local flavor. Marriott-Slaterville incorporated to preserve that, Mayor Keith Butler said. The community was surrounded by encroaching municipalities. Without incorporation, "We'd have been annexed out of existence," he said. "We didn't want to be erased.... The heritage means a lot to us. It means a lot to me. That was important to a lot of us old timers." Harrisville Mayor Fred Oates knows what Butler means. "You've got the pioneer spirit, the individuality of the families. You've got to be sensitive to these kinds of things." Is it worth the price? But being sensitive to these issues means ignoring a host of other problems, urban planners say. Urban areas that are fragmented, like those along the Wasatch Front, lose some control over their destiny, said Phil Emmi, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Utah. 494