It’s already Utah law that a lame-duck city council can’t appoint a new city manager. That’s because, as Rep. Nelson T. Abbott said, ”the new city council may have opinions on who the city manager should be.”
A wrinkle that law didn’t foresee: An incoming council having ideas on who the city manager shouldn’t be.
Abbott, R-Orem, has proposed a law that would address that, barring city councils from amending ordinances to make it harder to dismiss a city manager during that so-called interim vacancy period, generally between November elections and when a new council is sworn in in January.
While the bill seems like a response to then-Vineyard City Council members passing such a change in December 2023, Abbott stayed mum on what exactly inspired the proposal.
“Dare I ask where this comes from?” asked Sen. Nate Blouin, D-Salt Lake City, when Abbott presented the bill to the Senate Government Operations and Political Subdivisions Committee on Feb. 6.
“I’ll just say I think this is good policy,” Abbott responded.
In an earlier meeting, before the House Political Subdivisions Committee, Abbott alluded to “national headlines where there are concerns about an outgoing administration maybe trying to tie the hands of an incoming administration” as his reasoning.
The bill has moved through the Legislature without much discussion, much less consternation. No one from the public spoke when it appeared in House committee, and a representative from the Utah League of Cities and Towns was the lone public commenter at its Senate committee hearing.
The league’s deputy director, Justin Lee, spoke briefly, saying he worried about “tying elected officials hands on making decisions.”
“We understand that it’s a short time period,” Lee said, “but just that precedent of saying, ‘You’re still a duly elected official, but you can’t make the decisions right now; we’re going to push it off to somebody else later,’ is concerning.”
In a statement, Vineyard officials said they agreed with Lee’s stance, adding that they don’t expect to be “impacted by this bill.”
HB109 will next be heard by the entire Senate. From there, if passed, it could go to Gov. Spencer Cox’s desk for final approval.
What Vineyard did
In December 2023, with just weeks before half the then-City Council was replaced, members pushed through several controversial measures.
This included voting to lessen their own power — and ceding more control to Mayor Julie Fullmer — by amending city code to specify that four out of five council members would need to vote to remove officials, like the city manager, if the mayor disagrees, instead of a three-member simple majority.
(Kim Raff for The New York Times) Vineyard Mayor Julie Fullmer listens to a speaker during public comments at a City Council meeting in November 2024.
Some residents and city officials were incensed, calling the move “un-American” and a “power grab” in the mayor’s favor.
The move came as the city’s current and then-recently appointed manager, Eric Ellis, was embroiled in controversy over funds he had promised (but didn’t have control over) toward a doomed development project that would have built artificial islands, and housing, on Utah Lake.
Ellis served as the executive director of the Utah Lake Authority before he abruptly resigned about an hour after The Salt Lake Tribune asked him questions on Oct. 25, 2023, about his support for Lake Restorations Solutions, a company that led an effort to drain Utah Lake for development. Later that same day, the Vineyard City Council unanimously appointed him as city manager.
“The hiring process the city went through was extensive,” Fullmer said in a statement ahead of the City Council’s vote in December 2023. “... Out of the candidates we vetted, who were excellent, we found Eric to be the best qualified for this position. We did our due diligence, we understood about the letters, and the information that was shared tonight was incomplete. We feel comfortable about moving forward.”
Nearly a year later, in November, voters approved a proposition that would enlarge its current City Council from a five-member body to a six-member body. Fullmer lauded the move, saying, “In Vineyard, we believe in listening to the voice of the people.”
In the statement, Vineyard officials said that once a new council is elected in the fall, its first task will be updating city code to reflect the body’s new structure.
