Utah County committee presents maps for Alpine School District split; public comment open through March 26

Max “Mac” Sims, the county-appointed chair of three citizen advisory committees, presented proposed trustee-district maps to the Utah County Commission on March 12, outlining how three new Alpine School District trustee districts would be drawn and why the committee used 2023 population estimates from the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.

The committee recommended contiguous, compact districts that follow city and precinct lines where possible, Sims said, and factor in school boundaries, natural features and forecasted growth. “We needed to have good maps that got us good initial board members to get these different districts off on the right foot,” Sims said.

The presentation matters because the commission must adopt the new trustee-district maps and a random assignment of initial term lengths before elections. The commission intends to post the maps and a public feedback link the same day; Sims said the plan is to adopt final maps at the commission’s March 26 meeting after two weeks of public comment. He said state statute requires a random draw to assign three seats to three-year terms and four seats to five-year terms for initial staggering.

Sims told commissioners the committees used the Kem C. Gardner 2023 population estimates rather than the 2020 decennial census because local growth has outpaced the 2020 counts. He explained legal constraints tied to census geography: “When the US Census Bureau determines population, they do what’s called a census block. . . . if we want to draw lines and we need to have a population number associated with that, we can’t draw lines outside of the boundaries of a census block.” That limitation forced the committees to assign whole census blocks to seats even where rapid growth has made some blocks much larger in population than in 2020.

Sims described three draft maps for West, Central and South districts and explained the committee’s choices to under- or over-allocate population in specific seats in order to accommodate projected growth. He said committee members met three to four times, produced unanimously agreed maps, and solicited broader stakeholder input through conversations with city officials, school-board members and a South-district public survey that returned more than 1,000 responses. Kristen Swenson, a Utah County clerk’s office employee on the committees, participated to advise on GIS, elections and precinct impacts.

Commissioners voiced support for the stakeholder-driven process and acknowledged limitations created by using inter-census estimates: one commissioner said Utah County accounted for about 43% of the state’s population growth last year, making mid-decade redistricting imperfect but necessary. Sims emphasized the maps are not intended to be final for a decade: they will be revisited after the next census cycle.

The commission will accept public feedback through the posted link and intends to adopt final maps at its March 26 meeting, at which time it will also hold the random draw to determine the initial term lengths for the new trustee seats.

Sims and committee members said dates: public comment will be open for roughly two weeks; final adoption and random draw are scheduled for March 26. No formal vote on the maps occurred at the March 12 meeting.