Pappa Hardy's Musings on Life.

I recently engaged in a brand new, at least to me, activity that I had never been engaged in before. I attended a Community Planning Seminar in North Salt Lake and I started thinking a lot about things that I had not considered as much, like the number of exits from a subdivision, roads, there width, and so on and so forth.

This seminar went through a lot of the things that really needed to be defined and handled as you develop a community, and as I have since gone about my “Planning Commission” business, I have realized that there is more to building a community than erecting buildings. I am really in awe of all of the things that should be considered and used in making planning decisions.

One of the announcements mysteriously missing recently from announcements at the Semi-Annual Conference of the LDS Church was the building of the new Payson Utah Temple. Well, at least that would be the case for a lot of people in Payson. There have been rumors rampant in Payson for the last 9 months that there was going to be a new temple in Payson. Actually, there is a “prophecy”, at least the legend of a prophecy of a local Payson Bishop and Stake President that they had, in vision, seen a temple on the ridge above our home in Payson.

Earlier this year a builder, who wants to build homes on the rocky ridge above our home, had tried to encourage that rumor so he could get approval, without going through the actual process of getting approval, to build a housing development on the ridge. While one wonders why anyone would want to invest money in such a program right now because of the financial crisis in our country, there was still an effort by that builder to paint the Payson City Council and Planning Commission as bad people because we had not fawned over him when he presented the plan to us.

Instead, he has gone to a Stake in our area, and after talking about the “Payson Utah Temple” has painted us as the bad guys and put our name in print as the people who are obstacles to this dream. Maybe someday we will get a temple, and I would have loved to hear that announcement in General Conference, but for right now it doesn’t appear that dream is to be.

During my recent trip to Las Vegas, my current service on the Payson Planning and Zoning Commission came back to haunt me. Why is it that now whenever I see how the land is used and how the city is organized, that my service in Planning and Zoning comes into play.

While in Las Vegas, I was constantly looking at the signs all over and thought about how the varied uses would fit into the Payson Sign Ordinance. There were huge signs, small signs, signs of every description, used every way possible. I thought about how the surface of the sign, the square footage, the items displayed would fit into Payson’s uses. Payson’s ordinance is very confusing, and Las Vegas’ ordinance, must be a book.

I am sure that a lot of people don’t obey the ordinance either. There are signs everywhere, and that is just the sign portion of the planning and zoning bibles. For me, as a newly servicing Planning and Zoning Commissioner, it could be a Planning Commission Nightmare. Despite all of that, I have enjoyed serving on the Planning and Zoning Commission in Payson. Like other things that I have been doing in the years since I came back to Utah, this has been a new experience and I am doing things that I never have thought of doing before.